Across the First Dimension
by Moriabbey
Summary: Four years after the events of ATSD, the kids are leading ordinary lives, still with no memory of the Second Dimension. But everything changes when Isabella's Second Dimension counterpart comes to them for help. On hiatus.
1. Chapter 1: Running from the NormBots

****I apologize in advance for being slow between updates; I am a VERYslow writer. Also, I do NOT own Phineas and Ferb, otherwise Phinbella would have become canon halfway through the first season and every episode would be written like a romance novel (except without sex) and would just be about Phineas and Isabella dating, and eventually marrying.

**Second Dimension Isabella's POV**

Just about anyone else in my situation would have utterly terrified. A few years ago, I probably would have been utterly terrified. In fact, if I was going to be completely honest with myself, I was utterly terrified right now. I was just forcing myself to push those emotions aside for the moment. Not very effectively, it must be said, but I was making the effort.

I glanced over my shoulder. My earpiece shook, threatening to fall off and sever my only link back to my own dimension, but I couldn't spare the time or mental resources to reach up and fix it. Every ounce of my concentration was focused on running faster than humans were ever intended to, and getting to Phineas and Ferb. Anything beyond that wasn't important enough to bother with.

The NormBots were filling the air around me with laser beams, but didn't seem to be able to land a single hit. For all his intelligence, Doofenshmirtz never had gotten around to upgrading the NormBots' targeting equipment. The lasers almost never hit, but they could cause some serious damage if they did. Just ask Adyson.

Almost as a reminder of what they could do, one of the beams grazed my head, singing a few locks of my hair. I felt the beginnings of a serious burn where it hit. I ignored it. I couldn't do anything else.

In front of me, the alleyway I was running down opened into a major street; Oak, I think it was. I couldn't remember Danville's old street names. When I reached it, I jumped, landing in the bed of a truck. In my satchel was a laser I'd salvaged from a NormBot I'd disabled with a brick. Until now, I hadn't had enough time to use it, but now I pulled it out and made sure it was loaded.

Behind me, I could hear the NormBots crashing through the cars, and people screaming as they did. The truck I was in swerved violently, pulling me against the side and almost making me lose my grip on the laser. I pulled myself far enough out of the bed to take aim at the NormBots and squeezed off a blast.

It missed. It didn't even come close; it clipped a passing minivan three lanes away.

I slammed my fist against the truck bed in frustration. I suppose it made sense that, since the NormBots themselves were so inaccurate, weapons salvaged from their bodies would be too. It still made me angry. I tried to take another shot, but the truck swerved again, shoving me against the side again.

When I managed to pull myself up, the NormBots seemed to have spotted me and were following the truck, gaining steadily. I shot at them again and rolled off the truck. I felt something in my foot break when I did, but that was a problem for later.

The NormBots shot past me, apparently unprepared to turn quickly. One of them started smoking and shaking, but the other two seemed fine; I must have clipped him with the laser. The pain in my foot started to increase. I pulled a bottle labeled "fast-acting painkillers" out of my satchel and downed three pills. The pain in my foot started to recede. It was only a temporary measure, but it should give me enough time to get to Phineas and Ferb.

I stood up shakily, trying to keep weight off my injured foot. I couldn't feel anything in it, but I knew it was still badly injured. The two remaining NormBots began to come back around. Lying on the road next to me was a thick wooden plank. I picked it up with one hand and held up my laser with the other.

When the NormBots were almost on top of me, I jumped to the side and fired my laser. As it hit the first NormBot, bringing it down with a spray of smoke and sparks, I swung the plank at the other. It connected, with a sound like a rusty bell, and the NormBot hit the ground.

I planted my foot on its chest. It struggled, but the plank I'd hit it with must have damaged it badly. With deliberation, I placed my laser in the gap between its head and its body. Its struggling increased, to no avail.

I pulled the trigger.

It stopped moving.

I began trembling violently. The painkillers were already starting to wear off, and my ankle started to feel broken again.

"Oh my god," I heard someone say from behind me. I turned and saw a short, brown-haired woman climbing out of a car.

"What happened here?" she asked. She turned to me and her expression of shock turned into one of horror. "And what happened to you?"

I looked down at my foot. Blood was starting to cover it, like a gunshot wound from a pre-Doofenshmirtz movie. I could feel the pain start to increase, and I knew I probably wouldn't be able to stand on it soon.

"I need you to get me somewhere," I said.

"A hospital?"

I shook my head.

"Maple Drive. It's in the suburbs, about a half-hour from here."

She looked down at my ankle.

"I don't know... Your foot looks like it needs medical attention."

In my satchel, along with the laser and the painkillers was a stack of pre-Doofenshmirtz money we'd scavenged from the ruins of Old Danville. I pulled out a few of the bills and waved them at her. I saw her eyes light up at the sight.

"I need to get to Maple Drive. I don't know how much these are worth, but I'll give you all of them that I have if you take me there now."

She didn't say anything, and for a moment I thought I'd missed my chance at getting back to Phineas and Ferb. Twenty seconds later, she was two hundred pieces of green paper richer, and I was sprawled out in the back of her car, finally about to see Phineas and Ferb.

**Second Dimension Baljeet's POV**

There was a brief moment of glorious silence. I had been far too deprived of such moments over the last two days, and it was greatly welcome.

But before I had time to savor it, the rest of the room erupted into cheers, and my poor eardrums nearly ruptured. Don't get me wrong, I was just as happy as the rest of them that Isabella had made it to the First Dimension. I was probably happier, in fact, since I had had so much to do with getting her there. It was just that everyone besides me had gotten more than four hours of sleep in the last two days, while I was running on Mountain Dew and adrenaline.

I opened another two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and took a long drink. I could see the beginnings of a long party, and I knew I wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vanessa kissing Ferb. I smiled a little. The two of them and only really started talking after Doofenshmirtz the Second came to power, and it was soon obvious to everyone except them that they really liked each other. Of course, without that weird accident with a suspended animation machine, the age gap between them would have made the two of them getting together something only deranged fangirls would want.

In the meantime, someone seemed to have compromised my public-address system and was blasting loud music over the speakers. I would find out who it was and set their belongings on fire when I could muster the necessary concentration, and when my head didn't feel like it was tearing itself apart. Right now, even though it was a lost cause, I was going to try and get some sleep. My computer beeped as I got up. I ignored it.

My quarters were on the next floor up from the command center. Every step I took made my head pound like a drum. By the time I finally made it to my bunk, I could see about two feet in front of me. I flopped onto my bed and tried to fall asleep. The music coming from upstairs made my bed vibrate, which, as you might imagine, did not help matters.

In spite of this, I managed to tune out the rest of the world and felt myself quickly drifting off into sleep.

Suddenly, I remembered that beeping my computer had made. I hadn't been paying attention to it at the time, but it might have been... But was it?

I wasn't sure, but I had to check. I pushed myself out of my bed and ran back down the stairs to the command center. Nothing seemed to have changed since I left. Loud music was still blaring on the speakers, and everyone still seemed to be partying loudly.

My computer was still beeping when I arrived. I did a quick check of our defense system, and found that three of our twenty-four defense turrets were down. I pulled up the security camera footage for one of them.

The screen showed only static. I swore under my breath and moved on to the next one. I didn't see anything. I squinted a bit. The only thing that caught my attention was a faint shimmering just across from the turret. With a quick series of commands, I took manual control of the turret, swivelled it to face the shimmering, and fired it.

Someone materialized in the shimmering and was blasted back to the wall in a spray of gore. The cameras weren't equipped for audio, but I heard a faint thunk far down one of the corridors. No one else seemed to notice it, which didn't seem all that surprising.

The shimmering in the air was still there. There must have been someone else there. I swiveled the turret again, but apparently whoever it was had learned their lesson. The shimmering pattern started moving down the hallway, which probably meant the person was running away. I swiveled the turret back towards him and started firing. Several shots went wide before one of them hit. Just like the first person, this one decloaked and hit the wall in a spray of gore. I heard another thud down one of the hallways.

I gave myself a few seconds to breath and let my heartbeat slow down, and then my mind flooded with questions. Who were these people? Where did they get this technology? Who sent them here?

Of course, the answer to that last question was obvious. It had to be Doofenshmirtz. But why just these people? Even if they were completely hidden, it would only have been a matter of time before somebody noticed them.

At that last thought, I looked up at everybody else. On second thought, these people probably wouldn't have noticed a full-on invasion. But still, only two people was an inefficient way to take down our base. Doofenshmirtz's one great advantage over us was numbers. If I was in his place, I would have used that to maximum effect. So why wasn't he?

As if in response my computer began beeping. My heart fell, and I checked the message, a feeling of apprehension beginning to descend on me.

Another defense turret was down. There were more of them in the base. And on the long-range scanners, there were more radar signatures than the scanners could handle.

I had to tell the others. I frantically tried to hack back into my intercom system, to turn off the music and make myself heard, but whoever had broken into my system, he was good. It took me the better part of five minutes to get through, by which time most of our defense network was offline.

Two minutes of explanation later

There were a few moments of silence. Nobody spoke, nobody even breathed. The Candace showed us why, after all these years, she was still our leader. She took charge immediately, sending out everybody to arm themselves and ready us for the attack. I merely fell back into my chair. I was the researcher, the science expert. There was little I could do but wait and pray.


	2. Chapter 2: Doofenshmirtz is not happy

Here, finally, is the 2nd chapter of Across the First Dimension! Sorry if this took a while to get up, I'm a slow writer and actually had to hurry to get this up by now. Please, please, please, PLEASE review!

**Perry's POV**

Perry slid down the entrance tube like a bullet, dramatic music playing somewhere in the background. He felt himself being pinned to the sides of the tube when he rounded each corner. As he came around the last one, he saw the giant TV screen that dominated his lair coming into view ahead, and readied himself to jump off.

When he reached the end, he attempted to gracefully launch himself out of the tube and land in his chair. "Attempted" meaning, in this case, that he instead hit a bump at the end of the tube, fell out, rolled over a few times, and slammed into his chair.

He tried to stand up, but his head throbbed painfully and felt like it was spinning. Or it might have been that everything else was spinning around it. He couldn't really tell.

"Are you alright?" Major Monogram asked. Perry tried to make his growling noise in response, but ended up falling over onto his chair. He did manage to look up and nod.

"Well, if you say so," Monogram replied skeptically, and loudly cleared his throat. Perry's mind started racing (which, when combined with the spinning, gave him a terrible headache). He'd been called here for an Alpha-2 emergency briefing; the second highest in the O.W.C.A. What could possibly be important enough to justify it? Had Doofenshmirtz become intelligent? Was he allying with aliens? Had the O.W.C.A. supercomputer accidentally taken down the world power grid (again)?

A chilling thought crossed his mind, one that had been haunting him for the last four years. When the boys were just ten, they'd traveled to another dimension, where they'd learned his secret identity and fought an alternate, and far more competent, version of Dr. Doofenshmirtz. They'd had their memories erased at the end of the debacle, but he still had nightmares about it.

"Well, Agent P, it looks like your regular visit to Doofenshmirtz is going to have to wait. Do you remember those Second Dimension debacles we've been going through over the years?"

Perry leaned forward expectantly. So it did have something to do with the Second Dimension.

"Well, it seems that those troubles have come back to haunt us once again. We've detected a dimensional anomaly in Danville, which means that some form of cross-dimensional travel was recently used. The dimensional signature doesn't match that of a NormBot, but we can't tell much more than that, since our detector equipment was hit hard by budget cuts. This traveller may be connected to the Resistance, but approach them with caution, especially since they know of your secret identity."

Perry saluted and jumped into his rocket car. Major Monogram called out "Good luck, Agent P!" as he flew up through the roof of his lair.

**Doofenshmirtz's POV**

Doofenshmirtz scanned the horizon with a pair of cheap binoculars. Perry didn't appear. He looked down at his watch. He was twenty minutes late already.

"Where is he?" he muttered. "I'm always on time for his scheme-ruining. Is it too much to ask for him to do the same?"

"Perhaps he has grown tired of your constant failures as an evil scientist, and has asked to be transferred to a more successful one." That line came from Norm, and got Doofenshmirtz to remove his binoculars long enough to glare at him.

"Don't be ridiculous, Norm," he replied, once he was looking for Perry again. "Me and Perry, we've got a good thing going. He wouldn't leave me for another nemesis. I did that once... You remember Peter the Panda?"

"That implausibly small panda bear who was briefly your nemesis instead of Perry?"

"Yeah, him. I left Perry for him, and I felt terrible afterwards. I feel terrible whenever one of us has to do something besides fight each other. Like that time Perry didn't show up that summer four years ago. Of course, in that case, the feeling terrible was probably more due to being beaten up and having my lab destroyed by a potted plant, but it's the same principle."

"And what is that principle?"

Doofenshmirtz opened his mouth, like he was about to say something but suddenly forgot what.

After a few seconds of appearing to consider Norm's question, he replied "It's not important what the principle is, it's just that there is one. No, he wouldn't have left me for another nemesis. It must be something else. But what?"

"Perhaps he's sick, sir."

"No, that platypus is dedicated. He once came down with smallpox and came in anyways. I was disinfecting the lab for weeks afterwards, but it's the thought that counts."

He seemed to think about the issue for a moment (of course, it's always hard to tell with him) and eventually decided, "There must be something going on in his agency. And it must be something really big for them to pull Perry away from me."

He was silent for a moment, and then appeared to rethink his decision.

"Of course, he could have called ahead and told me he wasn't coming."

"But if the situation is bad enough that they need to send Perry somewhere else, then wouldn't it probably be urgent enough that he wouldn't have time to talk to you? Also, isn't Perry the Platypus incapable of speaking English?"

"Don't try to inject logic into my angry rant, Norm! No, he's obviously just being inconsiderate. Well, I'll show him. If he can forget all about his nemesis, then I can too!"

Behind Doofenshmirtz, just inside the building, was a large object under a tarp. He walked purposefully towards it and reached out to yank off the tarp. His hand stopped just short of it.

"Something's missing..." he mused.

"Someone to listen to your evil monologue?" Norm asked.

"That's it! Norm, listen to my evil monologue."

If Norm's eyes hadn't been painted on, a tear would have sprung to them.

"At last, my father is engaging in semi-parental activities with me!"

And if there had been a tear in Norm's eye, the glare Doofenshmirtz sent his way would have boiled it, and probably burned off most of Norm's paint as well.

"For the last time, Norm, I am your creator, not your father! I built you out of scrap metal, a squirrel cage, and old dryer parts!"

Norm was silent. Since his face was painted on, his emotions couldn't really be read from it, but he somehow managed to make a despondent expression. Doofenshmirtz nodded in approval and reached out to pull the tarp off the object again.

"That's better. Now, this... Is the-"

"What does it do?"

Doofenshmirtz sent another glare his way. While the previous one would have burned paint off of Norm, this one would have melted him into a pile of red-hot slag.

"You're not supposed to talk while I'm monologuing! Perry the Platypus never interrupted me during my monologues."

"But Perry the Platypus can't speak Eng-"

"Silence! Now, where was I... Ah, that's right. Behold, my-"

"Also, didn't you just disavow Perry the Platypus?"

"Norm! BE SILENT!"

Norm was silent again.

"Now, I was going to explain my evil scheme to you, but thanks to your constant interrupting, I seem to have run out of space, and all two people following this story will have to wait for that."

Doofenshmirtz reached out to finally pull off the tarp, and then the chapter ended.

This seems like a good place to address both of my reviewers (yeah, that's right, I've got a whole TWO REVIEWS!).

**Maximum3000: **Well, I don't really have anything concrete planned, but I have an Invader Zim fanfic that I started two years ago and never came back to that I hope to work on sometime.

**14AmyChan: **Thanks! It's nice to get some feedback, especially positive. Feel free to come back and review this story some more!

And to recap: PLEEEEEASE review!

Also, I'm very bad at coming up with chapter titles, so if you have any ideas, or just recommendations for anything about my story, feel free to leave your ideas in the reviews.


	3. Chapter 3: Ferb's Date

****Sorry about the delay on this chapter, I've had a lot of homework and I came down with writers block a couple of times during the writing process.

But I'm sure you didn't come here to listen to me complain about my life! Here, at last, is the long awaited Third Chapter! (not really, it's only been, like, a week)

**Isabella's POV**

Ferb was not himself.

First of all, Ferb looked nervous. Even though he'd become a lot more expressive in the last few years, his expression still mostly stayed in that blank almost-smile we'd become used to.

Secondly, he wasn't the kind of person to constantly obsess over his appearance like he was doing now. He must have asked Phineas if his tie was straight fifteen times in as many minutes.

Wait a second... Third, why was he wearing a tie in the first place? I'd never seen him wearing anything besides his purple coveralls and off-white button-up shirt. Now he was wearing a tie and... Dress pants?

Fourth, Phineas had completely clammed up about it. Usually, when something seemed to be wrong with someone, Phineas was the one who built something crazy to make them feel better. Now, whenever anyone asked him about what was going on with Ferb, he just smiled.

And fifth... Was he wearing cologne?

I shrugged and turned my attention back to the Space Adventures movie that we had playing. We'd probably find out sooner or later.

Besides, I had more pressing concerns right now, mainly Phineas. Despite the years of failed attempts I had gone through, I was still trying to get him to notice me. After all this time, I didn't hold out high hopes.

Why didn't he notice me? He was so perceptive otherwise; he always knew the right thing to say to someone to cheer them up. But when it came to noticing and acknowledging my feelings for him, he was a real idiot.

The logical thing to do, of course, would be to just come out and tell him. Seeing as I'd been going through this same dilemma for years, however, I think you can guess that it's never that simple.

Probably most important issue is that I'm never logical when it comes to Phineas. Normally, I'm the amazing leader of the Fireside Girls, smart and strong. Unfortunately, when I'm around him, it's hard for me to even hear what anyone else is saying when I'm around him, let alone think of multi-word responses. His unfortunate ability to make me completely zone out has gotten my troop and I into more than one scrape over the years.

And, of course, even though the odds of Phineas rejecting me if I came out and told him were small, there was still that "almost" to worry about. If I thought there was any possibility of him rejecting me, then there was no way I could tell him.

I was snapped out of my reverie by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. I frowned at the noise. Linda and Lawrence were at an antiques show in Chicago and weren't due back for another five days, and Candace was planning her wedding with Jeremy. Everyone else seemed engrossed in the Space Adventures movie we were watching, so I got up to answer.

The doorbell rang before I reached the door. "All right, all right, I'm coming," I muttered to myself. When I did open the door, I saw a girl about Candace's age, or maybe a year or two older, with long, flowing, black hair, and dressed completely in black leather. She looked a little bit like a female biker who'd joined Special Ops.

"Do I know you?" I asked.

She seemed a bit surprised at my reaction. "Didn't Ferb tell you I was coming?" she replied, sounding confused.

Ferb? What did he have to do with this girl? And did this have something to do with why he had been acting so weird. Now I was confused. "You know Ferb?" I asked.

She smiled a bit at my reaction.

"Apparently he didn't," she said. "I'm Vanessa. I'm Ferb's date tonight."

Wait, what?

Did she just say what I thought she just said?

A date... With Ferb.

Since when does Ferb go on dates?

"You have... A date... With Ferb?"

"Yes. Is that a problem?"

"No, no," I said, my voice almost contradicting what I was saying. "I'm just a little... Surprised."

Astounded, more like. Absolutely, massively, jaw-droppingly astounded. I had a million questions for this "Vanessa," but before I could grill her further, Ferb burst in.

"Oh-hey-there-Vanessa-nice-to-see-you-I'm-ready-to-go-I've-been-ready-for-the-last-couple-of-hours-now-really-nice-to-see-you-I'm-Ferb-but-I-guess-you-already-knew-that-I'm-ready-did-I-mention-that?"

Well... If nothing else, I suppose this explained why Ferb had been acting so unusual lately. I opened my mouth to start questioning Vanessa, and I was interrupted again by Phineas coming into the entryway.

"Oh, you're here!" he said happily.

"You knew about her?" I asked, and then mentally chided myself. Of course Phineas knew! I don't think he and Ferb were capable of keeping secrets from each other.

"Of course I knew," Phineas replied (I knew it! I thought to myself). "Ferb told me about her ages ago. He just asked me to keep it a secret."

"Why?"

"Well, what would your reaction be if Ferb came out and told you that he was dating a twenty year-old college student?"

I thought about his question for a moment. He had a good point. I won't say I would have laughed- I'm not that mean, but I would have been... Skeptical, to say the least.

"How long has Ferb known..." I briefly struggled to remember the girl's name. "... Vanessa?"

"About... Four years now, I think?" He looked back at Ferb for confirmation. He nodded. "Yeah, four years now. He saw her at the counter of Blueprint Heaven that summer, and she kept implausibly turning up at our inventions, but he took another three years to tell her he liked her."

"... Huh." I looked back at Ferb, who averted his eyes a little bit. "Alright, then. Have fun on your date."

"You heard her, Ferb," Vanessa told him. She held out her arm and, blushing, Ferb took it. They walked out the door, closing it behind them, and then I heard the sound of a pair of car doors closing, and that of a car pulling out of the driveway.

"That was weird," I said. Of course, 'weird' didn't even begin to cover it.

We went back downstairs to the movie. I'd just gotten settled into my seat on the couch (which was still warm) I heard another car pulling into the driveway. The doorbell rang a second later. Phineas got up to answer it this time.

I heard the door open, and then a gasp, in a voice that sounded like... No. It couldn't be.

I got up to check anyways. Everybody else seemed too engrossed in the movie to notice me. I tiptoed quietly up to the entryway, poked my head around the wall, and couldn't believe what I saw.

Standing there, with her arms wrapped around Phineas, was me.

**Isabella-2's POV**

I'd never thought I would see Phineas again. It was such a shock to just open the door and see his oddly triangular head there. Of course, judging by the look on his face, seeing me was a bit of a shock to him, too.

Then Isabella-1 burst in, and seeing herself hugging Phineas was probably more than a little traumatic for her.

I broke away from Phineas and chuckled nervously. He just looked at me like someone had hit him in the head with a brick, and First Dimension me just looked extraordinarily confused.

"I think I have some explaining to do here..." I said. Isabella-1 just nodded, her eyes wide open and blinking every couple of seconds.

"Yes, yes you do," she responded in a whisper.

Phineas looked between the two of us, stammering, and (understandably) seeming to be quite confused. Then, of course, Buford, apparently having heard us talking, came in and started doing the same. Pretty soon, everyone in our group of friends (except Ferb, strangely) was just standing there, staring at us.

I'd gone over this moment in my head so many times before. We'd been planning this for months, but none of us had really decided the best way to handle it. Ultimately, we'd just decided that we had enough problems with this mission already, and that we would just have to worry about it when we got to that point.

I started to open my mouth to explain, but Phineas interrupted me before I could begin. "You look familiar," he said.

"You do realize that she's me, right, Phineas?" asked Isabella-1, looking at Phineas incredulously.

"No, no, not that," he replied. "It's like... I have this feeling that I've seen her before. Or at least, someone who looks like you, but isn't you."

"You have! That's why I'm here!" I burst out. I couldn't believe it. It looked like the Amnesia-inator hadn't been completely thorough, at least on Phineas. "Oh, god, I can't believe one of you remembers."

"Woah, woah, woah," said Buford. "What is it that Phineas remembers?"

I took a deep breath.

"This is gonna take awhile," I said. "You might want to sit down."

As soon as we were all comfortably situated in the living room, I began to explain.

Roughly an hour of exposition later

"... And then we arrested Doofenshmirtz, and we never heard from you again." I stopped briefly to take a breath.

"I am skeptical," Baljeet cut in.

"What?" I asked.

"I am skeptical," he repeated. "You come here, spin us a ridiculous tale of an alternate Danville where Phineas and Ferb save the Tri-State Area from an army of evil robots, and expect us to believe you solely because of the fact that you look exactly like Isabella?"

Everyone else stared at him, while I remembered his innate talent for making people want to hit him.

"What?" he asked. "We cannot know with certainty that she is not merely wearing an extremely well-made disguise."

"But she looks exactly like Isabella," Phineas responded. "No disguise that wasn't made by me and Ferb is that good."

Everyone else chorused their agreement. Baljeet scowled and muttered something I couldn't make out to himself.

Phineas turned to me and said "Sorry about that. But, actually, I was wondering something myself."

I nodded. "Go ahead."

"If you weren't with us when we had our memories erased, how did you know that they were erased in the first place?"

"Well, afterwards, we realized that our own memories of what had happened were sketchy and missing in places. Baljeet did a few calculations on the nature of inter-dimensional travel, and he found out that there's some kind of link between each person and the version of them in the other dimension. Essentially, whenever someone happens to someone, then something similar happens to their counterpart, but not quite as severe, and it works much better for psychological effects than for physical ones. And, course, since very few of us actually helped you guys defeat Doofenshmirtz, none of us really knows much of anything that happened then. Most of what I just told you, we learned from second-hand accounts.

"Anyways, after we threw Doofenshmirtz into prison, we started trying to rebuild the Tri-State Area. We'd had our work cut out for us; he barely left anything from before his rule standing. Everything went smoothly for a while..."

When I stopped to take a quick breath, I felt everyone's anticipation rise.

"Then some of the prison guards we'd assigned to keep Doofenshmirtz secure started acting strangely. They'd wander out when they were supposed to be watching him or miss their shift by a few hours. We'd reprimanded them, and even replaced a couple, but the problems kept getting worse.

"Finally, me, the Fireside Girls, and Phineas and Ferb decided to see what was going on for ourselves. Everything seemed to be in place when we got there, but when we started to search the cell, Doofenshmirtz gave some kind of signal to the guards, and they started attacking us.

"I don't know where he got the parts for it, or how he managed to get it together without someone noticing, but somehow, he built a portable Mind Control-inator and used it on the guards months earlier. We'd picked them mostly for their physical abilities, so it wasn't too hard for them to force us back into Doofenshmirtz's cell. He just left us there afterwards; I guess he had bigger things to deal with then. We managed to break out of it after a couple of hours, but by the time we had, Doofenshmirtz had reactivated some NormBots we hadn't found, and was retaking the city. We knew right off the bat that fighting him with his army of NormBots was a lost cause, so we withdrew to a bunker the military built before Doofenshmirtz came to power, and we've been hiding out there ever since."

I paused a moment. These memories still held pain for me, even after two years.

"We... Didn't all make it through that night," I said. Even though everyone was already silent, they suddenly seemed to be even more so.

I looked down at the floor and took a slow breath before continuing. "A lot of us suffered severe injuries during our escape. One of the NormBots hit Adyson with a laser- not even a direct hit, just a glancing blow. But it incinerated half of her spinal cord, and now she's confined to a wheelchair. And Phineas..."

I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

"We were trying to get rid of some NormBots by going through the old library. Somehow, he fell behind us and we didn't notice until everyone else had made it through."

The tears were coming on harder now, and my speech was punctuated with sobs.

"The building was already on fire when we'd started in, and it was an inferno by the time we made it out. We never saw him again."

I had to stop there, since I couldn't speak through the tears that were now streaming down my cheeks, and the sobs in my throat blocked anything I might have wanted to say. Nobody else in the room seemed to know what to do, except First Dimension me. She just put her arms around me and held them there until my sobs died down.

She, out of everyone present, was uniquely equipped to understand what I was feeling. Sure, everyone else besides Phineas knew about my crush on him, but I've always thought that some of what we experience, we can never really convey to anyone else; some things have to be experienced to understand. Sure, everyone else knew about my crush on Phineas, but she'd felt it.

I reached out and hugged her back until I stopped crying.

When I did, I pulled away and wiped the tears off of my face.

"You... You were saying?" my First Dimension counterpart asked. I sniffed and resumed my story.

"Well, we managed to hide out in the bunker for about two years. Then, while we were scavenging an old base Doofenshmirtz had abandoned, we found plans and prototypes for an Other Dimension-inator. Apparently, he'd put the best scientists he could find on it, and he'd executed them when they couldn't deliver."

I smiled a little bit, and then choked back another sob.

"But they didn't have Baljeet. He took what they did, and he built us a portal to your dimension in a couple of months. Unfortunately, it could only send one person through, before it would burn out. We decided that Phineas was the only one who could figure out how to beat Doofenshmirtz, and since our Phineas..."

The tears started welling up in my eyes again.

"... Well, we decided that we needed to find another Phineas. So, we sent me through, and... Here I am."

"Let me get this straight," Phineas said. "You're saying that four years ago, me and Ferb somehow traveled to an alternate dimension, liberated it from the rule of an evil dictator, and then somehow had our memories of the entire incident erased?"

I nodded. "That's about the gist of it, yeah."

The room was silent again.

"Alright," Phineas finally said.

"What?" I asked. It couldn't be that simple.

"Sure," he repeated. "This "Doofenshmirtz character sounds like he needs to be taken down a peg, and I want to help with that. We'll need a way to get back to this dimension, first of all."

"Before that," I said, reaching into my bag. "We need to get your memories back." I pulled a rolled up sheet of blue paper out of the bag and held it out to Phineas. He took it and read the title out loud.

"De-Amnesia-inator," he read. He looked up and asked "Is this how we're going to get our memories back?"

I nodded.

"I can't really read most of the schematics, or the circuit diagrams, but I figured you'd be able to." He examined the blueprints more closely and started mouthing something to himself.

"Yeah," he said after a while. "I think we have most of the parts we'll need for this here, or we can get them at the electronics store. But it also requires a sphere of diamond exactly sixty millimeters wide. I don't think we have one of those."

I reached into my bag again, this time withdrawing a misshapen hunk of clearish crystal.

"Baljeet found this in what used to be a jewelry store. But when those plans say exactly, they mean down to the atom. This is about sixty millimeters, but it needs to rounded."

Phineas took the diamond and looked it over. The overhead lights refracted through it, casting a muted rainbow across the floors and walls.

"I see," he said. "Do you know where we can get it rounded? Could we just take it to a jewelry store and have them grind it or something?"

I shook my head.

"An ordinary jewelry store is nowhere near precise enough," I said. "There's only one place in the Tri-State Area that can cut gems to that precision."

"And where might that be?"

"Well, when we were scavenging in the ruins, we found some mentions of a secret government organization, one that we think has the facilities to do something like this."

I paused for dramatic effect.

"Have you ever heard of the O.W.C.A.?"

**Perry's POV**

Perry hadn't thought his day could get any worse. The lead Monogram had sent him on had, for once, turned out to be a dud, Doofenshmirtz probably hated him for not showing up today, and his rocket car had ran out of fuel when he was halfway home, and he'd had to walk the rest of the way.

And now, not only had Isabella-2 somehow showed up on his doorstep, but now she was in the midst of getting his family (alright, just Phineas) and their friends to help her break into the O.W.C.A.?

At least she didn't know his secret identity, through some staggeringly improbable series of coincidences. There was a piece of good news. Perry never had been one to focus on the positive aspects of a situation, though. He'd always wanted to look at it practically, and get a good idea of what he could do about it.

He activated his wrist communicator and turned down the volume. The face of Major Monogram sprang onto the tiny screen.

"What is it, Agent P?" he asked. Perry turned the watch face to the living room, and, more importantly, Isabella-2. When he turned it back to himself, he saw that Major Monogram was more frightened than he had ever seen him.

"Great googly-moogly..." he whispered to himself, almost reverently. "Has she revealed your secret identity to your family?"

Perry shook his head. Monogram nodded to himself. He suddenly seemed distracted and distant.

"I... Yes... Alright, do you have any idea what her plan is?"

Over the years, since Perry's inability to speak had proved a liability on numerous occasions, he and Monogram had developed a form of sign language that allowed them to communicate with each other. When he was done describing Isabella-2's plan to raid the O.W.C.A. headquarters to get the equipment to cut their diamond, Monogram swore, the first time that Perry could remember him doing so.

"This is not good, Agent P," he said when he was finished. "I need you to get back here immediately to help us prepare for this. There's no way we can allow them to get a functional De-Amnesia-inator; restoring their memory would compromise the security of the agency. We're just going to have capture them, wipe their memories again, and come up with some plausible explanation for there being two Isabellas."

Perry saluted, and then began a dash for his lair. On some level, he felt terrible at having to do this to his family again, but he knew that if Monogram said it had to be done, it had to be done.

He jumped in his automatically refueled rocket car and flew out, heading for the O.W.C.A. headquarters.

Whew, all that writing has tired me out, so I'm gonna go play on my computer.

Thanks to my reviewers (as stated before, pleeeeeeeease review):

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Thank you!


	4. Chapter 4: The Resistance Crushed

****Whoo! It's done! Sorry for the delay on this chapter, I kept getting writers block and had to get help from my cousin. PLEASE review (and favorite, and follow, but mostly review). This is my first fic, and it means a lot!

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**Baljeet-2's POV**

The base was completely and utterly quiet, with no noise being heard except for the distant thrumming of our reactors. Nobody spoke, except in whispers. We knew that Doofenshmirtz could probably had the tech to hear every word we were saying, and we weren't going to do anything to make his job easier.

I glanced up at my computer screen, saw that nothing seemed to have changed, and went back to the circuit board I was soldering. We'd lost a lot of ground when Doofenshmirtz first attacked, mainly because we were so unprepared. We'd only stopped him from taking the whole base by setting off an EMP- an electromagnetic pulse to the layman. Essentially, it disables all electronics around it when it's used. We'd taken down most of our cameras in the area when we did so, but we were about to lose the area anyways, so we considered it a small price to pay. The offensive had just petered out after we got the blast doors working and sealed ourselves off, and since then, nothing much had happened.

Candace walked in and slumped over in a chair. Her trademark sunglasses were pulled up over her forehead. I put away my soldering iron and walked over to her.

"How goes it?" I asked in a whisper. She held up her hand and moved it from side to side, the universally accepted signal for "so-so."

"The good news is, Doofenshmirtz doesn't seem to know what we're up to. The bad is that we still haven't made much progress. It doesn't help that we can't make any noise without him spotting the vents and pumping in tear gas through them."

"I am just glad he hasn't spotted them yet."

Candace nodded.

"Well, if this takes any longer, he probably will. We need to hurry up our operations."

She looked back down at her watch and got up.

"Speaking of which, I'd better get back to it."

"You sure I can't help?"

"You're just too... Small, Baljeet. I don't think you're really cut out for heavy lifting.

I sighed. Candace took that as a sign of agreement and left. I looked back down at the plans for the base, overlaid with pencil marks of what we were planning to do. There were long lines drawn through the air vents, which reached all eight hundred feet up to the surface. Not directly above us; Doofenshmirtz would find them immediately and pump in tear gas or something. No, they actually came out about two miles to the east of the bunker.

They had never been built to climb through; they were about three feet wide and had more than one sharp turn. In order to get through them at all, we were going to have to use jury-rigged grappling hooks mounted in Pre-Doofenshmirtz air rifles.

Of course, I was not much help in this. I never had been a very good shot, and the weight of the grappling hooks effectively destroyed any accuracy I might have had. I sighed and went back to my circuit board.

A few seconds later, I swore out loud. I'd just soldered the legs of a transistor I was using together. I didn't have any spares on me, but there might be some in the storage room.

As it turned out, this bunker had been built back in the fifties, and everything in it we hadn't scavenged from elsewhere also dated from then. So, while we didn't have any transistors, we did have a big stack of vacuum tubes, which did about the same thing, except they were clunkier and less efficient.

They would do, though, for what I was working on. I grabbed one and started back towards my lab.

Suddenly, I heard a faint hissing noise. I knew the sounds of the bunker I'd lived in for the last two years, and that was not one I'd heard before. I dialed up Candace on my communicator.

Silence.

That didn't necessarily mean anything bad. There were any number of reasonable explanations. I couldn't think of any off the top of my head, but I was sure there were some. Somewhere. It didn't mean anything that I couldn't think of any of them.

I sidled over to the wall anyways, just to be safe, and dialed Gretchen. She didn't pick up then, either. I swore again, and tried all of the others, in sequence.

Nothing.

By the time I made it back to my lab, I could feel my eyes starting to tear up, and the air was beginning to get blurry. Gas, I thought to myself. He's pumping in gas through the air vents. The others had probably found out too late and were either unconscious or dead; they were all right next to the vents.

No. Not all of them. I remember Adyson's arms had never completely recovered after that incident with a NormBot laser when we first got here, even though they fared a lot better than her legs. There was no way they were strong enough to hold a grappling hook. She was probably back in her quarters reading or something.

But first...

I grabbed a pair of goggles, some tape, a rag, and some assorted chemicals from my lab desk. After a few seconds, I had something to protect myself from whatever Doofenshmirtz was pumping in. Not very efficient, and probably liable to incur long-term health risks, but it would do for right now.

After I put together a second one for Adyson, I headed down the hall to her quarters. I would have yelled for her if I wasn't afraid of accidentally inhaling the oily gas that now filled the air.

When I got there, I found the steel door shut tightly. I pounded on it and yelled "Adyson!" as loudly as I could through the cloth covering my mouth. After a few seconds, the door cracked open the slightest bit. Adyson looked through the slit it formed.

"Baljeet? Is that you?"

"Yes, it is me, Adyson. Please let me in!"

She opened the door just wide enough to let me in, and then shut it behind me again. The moment I got inside, I pulled off my mask and sucked in a breath of clean air. I seemed to have forgotten what it felt like.

"What's happened out there?" she asked.

"Gas," I began, stopping to take a hacking, coughing breath. "Doofenshmirtz must have found the air vents and started pumping it in through them. I can't raise anyone on my comm set; I think they're all unconscious already."

She nodded slowly and looked down at the floor.

"Well, I guess we all knew this could happen eventually. Still smarts, though."

"Either way, we need to get out of here. Doofenshmirtz has not sent in any NormBots, so that should simplify things. I think he is just waiting for the gas to get everyone."

"Well, I'm not getting through the gas by myself. Do you have another one of those masks?"

I held it out to her.

"Be careful with it. I am not entirely certain what all of the chemicals in it do. I believe that using it for extended periods will put you at increased risk for about five different kinds of cancer."

She cast a suspicious eye toward it.

"I am not certain," I emphasized. "And if you have a better idea for getting out of here without inhaling the gas outside your door, I would love to hear it."

It seemed she did not. She took the mask without a word.

"Excellent," I said. "Now, most of the NormBots are still disabled by the EMP we used. Doofenshmirtz may have posted human sentries, but if he has, they're going to need gas masks too, and they will restrict their vision. We're just going to have to be very quiet."

"Should we go now?"

"The longer we wait, the better the chance of Doofenshmirtz coming down on us. We have to leave before he brings his full military force to bear. So, yes, now would be good."

Like the rest of us, Adyson didn't have much to her name. A couple of books and a NormBot laser were about what we all had. When we made it to the blast doors, it took me all of five seconds to hack the locking mechanism and open them enough for us to squeeze through. They made less noise than you would expect based on their size, but it still felt like we were alerting everyone on Earth to our presence.

We held close to the wall in a recess, covered by shadow. I could see people streaming past to see why the door had just opened. I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, but nobody seemed to have any idea. Eventually, they apparently decided that this was the only door that opened for any reason since they'd got here, and started rushing in.

When they all seemed to have gone, I stuck my head out to look around.

"Wow," I said in a surprised tone. "They did not even leave sentries."

"Yeah, Doofenshmirtz usually has better planning than that.," Adyson replied. "Let's get out of here before they remember."

We had to go slowly, mainly due to the fact that Adyson's wheelchair couldn't effectively go around the NormBot hulks lying everywhere, and I had to move them out of the way instead. She kept insisting that I go on ahead, and that she could get out just fine by herself, and I insisted just as strongly that she couldn't. Eventually, she gave up on it.

We were almost to the entrance before I spotted another guard. He stood in the doorway leading out, holding a laser rifle in his hands and scanning

"I guess they did leave some behind," I said.

"Found one?"

"Yeah. I don't think he sees us."

"Can you take him out?"

"With what? I'm liable to shoot myself in the foot if I try to use a gun, and I haven't got anything else we could use."

"I'm a good shot."

"He is, like, sixty feet away. He will find us if you don't take him out the first time."

"I will."

I sighed and handed over my rifle. She held it up and lined up the guards head with the sights. I put my hands over my eyes; I couldn't stand to watch him if he came after us.

The rifle made a noise like a chainsaw cutting through a lightsaber. I peeked through one eye, unable to restrain the temptation.

The guard was still standing there, motionless, with a scorched black hole right between his eyes. As I watched him, astounded, he fell over backwards with a dull thud.

I looked over at Adyson. A sly smirk crossed her face.

"I'm sorry I doubted you," I said.

"Apology accepted," she replied. "Now let's get out of here before everyone else comes to see what that noise was."

We'd almost made it to the door when other guards came. They started yelling and shooting at us. I lunged for the door, pulling Adyson's wheelchair behind me while she kept shooting back. When we left, I messed around with the door for a few seconds to seal the guards in, and then took a moment to breath.

"We made it," I said, panting. Adyson nodded.

"Now let's get out of here before they get that door open," she said.

**Doofenshmirtz-2's POV**

He slowly drummed his fingers on the desk, forming the rhythm to some song only he could hear.

"You let them get away," he said in a tone full of ice. The man standing before him trembled visibly.

"W- well, yes, sir, but only those two," he said. "The rest-"

"You let them get away," Doofenshmirtz said. He stood up and walked over to the man, whose shaking got much worse. He stood over him and glared down.

"You were supposed to capture all of them. Not all but two, all of them."

"There were some complications, sir. We'd thought all of them would be at the vents and we hadn't made adequate plans for if that hadn't happened."

"And whose fault is that? Yours."

"Bu-bu-but-"

"No buts. Monogram!"

Doofenshmirtz's indentured executive assistant, the former Major Monogram of the O.W.C.A., came in holding a clipboard.

"Yes, Doofenshmirtz sir?"

"This man has failed me. Have him executed."

The man looked up at him and shook his head frantically, his mouth open in a wordless expression of terror. Monogram gestured to the guards who were standing just outside the door. They came in and grabbed the man who Doofenshmirtz had just condemned and pulled him out. His screams carried in through the door, and eventually faded.

"Who was that, if you don't mind my asking?" Monogram asked. Doofenshmirtz looked up, looking surprised for a moment.

"What? Oh, he was my Chief of Police."

"Another one?"

"I know. It's impossible to find good guard material these days."

"Especially when you keep having them executed."

A gunshot echoed through the room. Monogram developed a sudden interest in finding something else to do.

Doofenshmirtz sat back down in his chair with a sigh. Oh, it was great that he'd finally conquered the Resistance, but it was long overdue. It had been two years since he'd come to power again, and even in his first rule, he'd been unable to stamp them out.

And now... Even now, his victory was incomplete. He had the leaders of the Resistance, and even most of the rank and file members, but two of them seemed to have escaped. All of their equipment, everything they might have used to cause trouble for him was in the bunker he'd just captured, but he knew they would find a way to aggrieve him just the same.

A few taps on his desk brought up a holographic display of everything the Resistance had done to him over the years. The list went on and on. Mostly just sabotage, and low-level sabotage at that, but they were capable of doing severe damage if the circumstances were right.

They would cease to exist as an organization after tonight, with just about all of them in captivity. But those two, Baljeet and Adyson, they could still hurt him if he didn't find them soon.

He pressed a button on his desk, which put him on a secure line with his Minister of Internal Affairs, Joseph Gregory. He began the call with a sharp "Joseph!"

"Yes, my liege?" he replied.

"There are two members of the Resistance that escaped the capture of all the others. I need you to put out an immediate warrant for their arrest, on all channels. Television, radio, posters, everything. I want people to know we want these people in."

"What shall I say they've done?"

Doofenshmirtz considered Gregory's question. It had merit; if he merely said that they were enemies of the state, then people would probably shelter them and do anything necessary to keep them safe.

"Be creative," he eventually decided. "Say that they're guilty of the worst things that you can think; things that the general public would think are utterly horrifying, not bad things they've done to me. There are already plenty of those, and they'd probably have the wrong effect."

"Very good," Gregory said. "I'll get right on it."

Doofenshmirtz ended the call and laid back in his chair. He was about to go back to thinking about everything the Resistance had done to him over the years when Major Monogram burst in the door. He almost jumped in his chair with a yelp.

"We've found something, sir," Monogram said. "You need to see it."

"Is it more important than my musings?"

"It may well be the most important thing that's ever happened to us."

Doofenshmirtz considered this, scowling, for a moment.

"Very well," he said finally, "But if I'm unhappy with this, you'll go the way of that last Police Chief."

Monogram gulped loudly.

"Because I just had him executed, see? And I'm going to have you executed if-"

"I understand what you mean, sir."

The ride in his executive hover car took about an hour, even though everything else on the road pulled over to the side whenever they saw him. Doofenshmirtz could see pedestrians looking at him with fear.

He nodded to himself. Fear was good.

They pulled up to the Resistance bunker. Doofenshmirtz asked, "Is the gas dissipated yet?"

"The officer in charge of this operation assures me it is safe to breathe."

"Is he wearing a gas mask in there?"

Monogram looked a bit distraught at the question, and took a moment to answer.

"... Yes, he is, sir."

"Than have him executed and bring me his gas mask."

Twenty minutes later, Monogram returned from the bunker with a gas mask that had a neat bullet in the back with powder burns around it. Doofenshmirtz put it on without taking much notice of it.

Monogram led him deep into the bunker, past heaps of NormBots and a few Resistance corpses. Doofenshmirtz didn't take any notice of them, either. They finally stopped at the entrance to one room.

"Prepare yourself, sir," Monogram said before opening the door.

Doofenshmirtz walked in and looked around for a moment. The room was bare and utilitarian, the floor covered by tangles of cables, all leading too...

He looked towards the center of the room and gasped.

"Is that..."

Monogram nodded.

"Yes sir. It is. It seems to be burnt out and nonfunctional, but it's recently used, according to our sensors."

Doofenshmirtz walked up and put a hand on the sleek metal of the device.

"An Other Dimension-inator..." he whispered to himself. He suddenly seemed to come out of his trance, and whipped around to face Monogram.

"Order a full military mobilization," he said. Monogram began writing in his clipboard. "And have any scientists I haven't executed already start working on this."

His eyes suddenly seemed to be full of fire, and his expression became one of quiet, fierce anticipation.

"The Other Dimension will fall..."

* * *

Yeah, I know, not the best ending. Not by my own (somewhat unrealistically high) standards, anyway.

I'd like to thank the following for reviewing:

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **HEY, EVERYBODY! THIS IS MY COUSIN! SHE GOT KIND OF ANNOYED THAT I DIDN'T ACKNOWLEDGE THIS BEFORE, SO I'M TRYING TO MAKE UP FOR IT NOW!

**fan-like-irving: **Er, yeah. Sorry that didn't happen this chapter. Next chapter, I promise!

**14AmyChan**

**gamelover41592**

**FanFicCriTicTheThird: **Yeah, I kind of feel the same about Ferbnessa. I mostly put it in because my cousin (that's her above) wanted me too. But I will reduce that age gap somehow! Also, thanks for going back and reviewing the other chapters. It means a lot to me!

**pirates99**

And, as said above, please review, everyone!

That's it. Thanks!


	5. Chapter 5: Breaking into the OWCA

I'm sorry that I'm so dreadfully late with this chapter. I don't really have a good reason, other than "I kept getting distracted," and I'm still none to happy with the chapter as it is (but that might just be me). Also, I'm sorry it's so short.

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**Isabella-2's POV**

My bike skidded to a stop on the deserted country road, forcing everyone behind me to do the same.

"This should be the place," I said. "But all I see are a few fields, some trees, and that giant concrete wall."

There was a moment of silence as we noticed the hole in that reasoning.

"Right..." I responded to my own statement. "What do we have that can get through concrete?"

Baljeet pulled off his backpack and began sorting through it.

"Two kilograms of plastic explosive, a Cheese Ray, and a device that allows us to go through walls."

"Is that the one we built to get moms lucky guitar pick out of the wall a few years ago?" Phineas asked.

"The very same," Baljeet replied.

"Alright, let's use that."

Baljeet reached into his backpack and pulled out a smallish metal orb. Everyone else moved to put their hands on it, and after a few seconds, I realized that that's what I was supposed to do.

There was a weird sensation for a moment, like the atoms in my body were trying to vibrate away from each other. Then it faded and everyone took their hands off of the sphere. I walked over to the wall and cautiously tried to put a hand on it. To my surprise, it went straight through.

"That's cool," I said, and stuck my head through the wall to get a look around. A sign posted on the lawn said "OWCA Secret Headquarters (Pay no attention to this sign)."

A bit redundant, I thought to myself. I pulled my head back through the wall and called out to the others "It's over here!"

**Perry's POV**

Perry watched they security camera in horror as the kids seemed to walk right through the wall they'd erected. Major Monogram swore, while Carl frantically entered commands into the security computer.

"I knew that wall was a wasted effort," Monogram said. "We're going to have to break out the big guns. Carl, how many agents do we have in reserve?"

"Just about all of them," Carl said without looking up from his computer. "You recalled all the agents not on active missions."

"Alright... Send in Agent C and Agent Peter. Tell them that stealth is of the essence."

"Right away, sir." Carl finished typing something into his computer, then rolled his chair over to the one reserved for giving agents assignments. He typed quickly, and then moved back to the security computer.

"They're on their way, sir," he said. On a console behind them, a warning light came on, but no one in the room noticed it.

**Isabella-2's POV**

"You know, it really doesn't look like much," Buford commented, looking up at the OWCA building.

"Well, it's a secret government agency," I replied. "It's supposed to look unremarkable."

"If they're so secret, why do they have that sign saying this is their secret headquarters?"

"Well... It's no secret that governments are usually pretty incompetent. These guys are probably no different."

I looked up at the squat building. Buford was right; it looked like a place an oil company might use for corporate meetings.

But it wasn't an oil company building, and we had to get in there. I scanned it for an entrance, seeing a front door that was probably alarmed, and a bunch of windows that probably were too.

I turned to Baljeet and asked "Can you disable an alarm system?"

He appeared thoughtful.

"Maybe," he said. "I'd have to get a closer look to be sure."

There was a rustling noise in the bushes. Everyone jumped, and probably would have grabbed their weapons if they'd had any. I set a hand on my laser rifle.

Nothing happened for a moment. Slowly, the tension in the group lowered.

"Must have been the breeze," Buford said after a long silence. There was a pause before Ferb answered, "There's no wind."

I pointed my laser rifle at the bush. It quivered, and then a chicken and a panda bear jumped out from behind it.

Well, that was weird, but the animals didn't seem to be dangerous. I was lowering my laser rifle when the chicken grabbed me by my legs and slammed me against the ground. The world swam before my eyes, and I heard the sounds of a fight beginning between the animals and the other kids, but I couldn't see or take part in it.

After a few minutes, I felt my head begin to clear. I pulled my head up a bit, but I didn't feel well enough to stand up by myself yet.

Next to me, the chicken lay unconscious, apparently taken down by one of the others. Baljeet seemed to be having some sort of karate duel with the panda, while the others looked on in amazement.

I blinked several times. I'd known that our Baljeet was a martial arts master, but I'd always assumed he'd somehow got those skills after Doofenshmirtz came to power. I'd never thought his First Dimension self had them.

The two were moving so fast, I couldn't actually make out any of the actual action, just the occasional arm or leg. Eventually, Baljeet came out on top, with the panda laying prone beneath his foot. We broke into applause, at which he took a bow.

"Thank you, thank you," he said. "You are too kind."

When the applause died down, my First Dimension counterpart asked "What was that?"

I looked down at the panda and pushed it with my foot a little bit. It felt like real flesh and fur.

"Well, I think they're real animals," I said. "Not robots or something like that."

"So why did we get attacked by a couple of animals?" she replied. "And anthropomorphic ones at that."

"... Well, the records we recovered talked about "agents" of some kind. It didn't mention anything about them being animals, but I guess these might them."

"So what you're saying is we're attacking a facility defended by tons of cute little animals who seem to know karate?" Buford asked. I waited a moment, not really wanting to answer.

"Yeah," I said finally. "I guess we are."

**Perry's POV**

"They're on the move again, sir!" Carl shouted out, his fingers flying over the computer controls. "I've noticed!" Monogram called back. His gaze alternated between the security camera feeds and the user's manual for the security system. "Have you got the laser tripwires online yet?"

Perry listened to the conversation with only half an ear. His eyes were glued to the monitors. The defenses were designed to be nonlethal, but the OWCA contractors were a running joke among the organization. He knew there was a real chance the defenses might kill his owners.

He glanced at the building plans laying on the coffee table. If his owners could make it through the hallway they were in, there weren't any more defenses between there and the diamond cutter room.

Of course, them making it through that hallway was by no means certain. That stretch of hallway was one of the most heavily defended in the whole building. He'd always thought it would have been more reasonable to concentrate the defenses near the entrances, but there was no explaining the mind of the OWCA higher-ups.

Suddenly, he noticed a warning light flashing behind him. It was positioned in exactly the right position to go unnoticed by everyone in the room, which, considering it's importance, was a serious oversight. He ran over to Carl and tugged his shirt sleeve, pointing at the warning light.

Carl glanced over at the warning light Perry was pointing at.

"Sir!" he called out. "We have an Other-Dimension-inator signal."

"Can you identify the source?" Monogram said without looking up from the security footage.

Carl typed in a brief string of commands before answering. "No, sir," he said. "My guess is, it's the Resistance."

Monogram sighed and rubbed his eyes.

"Alright, we'll have to deal with that later," he said. "Right now, we have to deal with these kids. I'm sure it can wait until then. If it was the Second Dimension Doofenshmirtz, then we'd be in _real _trouble."

**Doofenshmirtz-2's POV**

The Other Dimension-inator stood smoking in the middle of the room after it's latest test. Doofenshmirtz scowled at it, looking ready to shoot someone (all too literally, in his case).

"You have about thirty seconds to give me a good explanation," he said. Next to him, his Chief Scientist stood trembling. He had been the one in charge of repairing the Other Dimension-inator, and thus far, he had failed.

"I-I'm sorry sir," he said, his voice trembling along with his body. "But this device is just... Half of these components seem to be made from scratch, and even the ones we can identify, we can't pin down their capacitance, resistance, or anything concrete about them. And the rest of them, we can't even tell what they are."

Doofenshmirtz said nothing. His face betrayed that he was angry, but that was pretty much how he always looked. The scientist was new, and hadn't yet learned to recognize when Doofenshmirtz was truly angry. It looked like he probably wouldn't live long enough to gain that experience.

"How soon can you have it operational?"

The scientist looked back down at the burned-out Other Dimension-inator.

"I don't know. I'm not even sure if we can get it working."

"What if I got you the person who did, and got him to tell you how he did it?"

"In that case, it would take us... Maybe a week."

"Excellent," Doofenshmirtz said, placated. The scientist seemed oblivious to just how close he'd come to an early death. Of course, odds were he still would, just a bit later.

Doofenshmirtz let the scientist get back to what he was doing, and dialed Monogram on his cell phone.

"How much progress have we made on catching Baljeet and Adyson?" he asked.

"The long and the short of it is, not much, sir," Monogram said.

"What do you mean, 'not much?" The anger was back in Doofenshmirtz's voice, and back in full force.

"I mean, we can't find them. They have no known contacts outside of the Resistance, and no other Resistance hideouts that we know of. We simply have no idea where they might have gone."

Doofenshmirtz breathed heavily for a moment, then gave Monogram a brief "excuse me," pulled out a pistol and shot the scientist in the head.

He smiled and put the phone back to his ear. He felt much better now.

"Alright, what were you talking about?"

Monogram pretended not to notice the gunshot he'd just heard.

"Well, we simply have no idea where to start."

"Has anyone come forward with information?"

"Well, sir, I think the people know Baljeet and Adyson are conspiring against your regime, as opposed to being guilty of the various crimes you've accused them of."

"Hmm..." Doofenshmirtz appeared thoughtful. "Try offering a reward."

"How much, sir?"

"Start at five hundred thousand each, and bump it up periodically."

"Very good, sir."

"And get me a new Chief Scientist."

"Oh, that's what that gunshot was."

* * *

It kind of feels like nothing much happened in this chapter, but, again, I'm never really happy with anything I write.

Many thanks to the following for reviewing:

**FanFicCriticTheThird**

**Sleeping Kangaroo**

**14AmyChan**

Is that really everyone? Where'd you all go?

Please, please, PLEEEEEEEEASE review!


	6. Chapter 6: Plans for the Resistance

****Alright, before I begin, I'd like to make a brief announcement. I know I've been a bit sporadic with my updates, and so I'm going to try and hold to a two-week update schedule. Sorry if that's a bit long; like I said, I'm a very slow writer. I'll try and work faster than that, but don't hold your breath.

Anyways! Here's chapter six. Enjoy!

* * *

**Baljeet-2's POV**

I pushed Adyson's wheelchair in the door to the abandoned hotel, then closed the door behind me and took a well-deserved breath.

"Okay," I said. "I think we're safe."

"You sure we weren't followed?" Adyson asked nervously. I shook my head.

"And if we were, we'll find out soon enough."

"That's hardly encouraging."

I ignored her.

"What do we have?" I asked. We hadn't had time to do a real inventory of our equipment since we'd got out of the bunker. Adyson pulled her bag off her wheelchair armrest and looked through it.

"Some dehydrated food, my laser rifle, and a couple of books," she said. "You?"

I unslung my backpack and quickly looked through it.

"About the same," I said. "We are going to need some more supplies if we want to last more than a couple of days, but water will probably be more of a problem at first."

"Well, any food here probably went bad over the last two years," Adyson said. "There might be some preserved food here somewhere, but this doesn't really strike me as the kind of place that had a lot of that on hand."

I nodded. "What part of the new city are we closest to?"

Adyson checked her communicator, then slapped it several times as the GPS proved uncooperative. When she finally got it working, her eyebrows shot up in surprise, and she whispered something I couldn't make out under her breath.

"Well?"

She looked up, her face almost frozen in an expression of surprise.

"The Nobles District," she stuttered out.

"Wait- _the_ Nobles District?" I asked skeptically. That couldn't be right. "The place where Doofenshmirtz's Ruling Families live?"

"No, the other Nobles District," she replied sarcastically. "The prison ghetto where Doofenshmirtz sends political prisoners he doesn't just execute right off the bat. What do you think?"

"Alright, alright! There is no need to get persnickety with me!"

She rolled her eyes. Suddenly, her face lit up, like an idea had just occured to her. "How did we get in there that one time?" she asked. "When we were trying to get some intelligence on where Doofenshmirtz had moved his main prison."

I thought back. I remembered that we'd done that right after Doofenshmirtz had come to power the second time, when a lot of our members were still imprisoned by Doofenshmirtz.

"... We disguised ourselves as servants," I said eventually, not really wanting to tell Adyson, but without any real experience lying. "Some of our less recognizable members snuck in during a big party and got away with reams of computer data without being noticed."

Adyson started to say something, but I held up a hand and cut her off.

"And before you get any ideas, we are not going to try that. I was passed over as an infiltrator for that mission for a good reason: my accent and my physicality are immediately obvious to anyone with an optic nerve and half a brain."

"We could disguise you!" she enthused. "You can fake a British accent well enough to cover your Indian. And besides, do you have a better idea for getting everyone else free?"

"Easy," I said. "We sit tight and survive until Isabella gets back with Phineas and Ferb."

"We have no idea how long that could take. For all we know, something might have happened to her and she can't get Phineas and Ferb."

"You know Isabella! That would not happen!"

"But what if it did?"

"It would not-"

"Indulge me."

I considered the scenario.

"For whom do you wish to hear the ramifications of this scenario for?" I asked. It seemed to take her a moment to decipher what I'd just said.

When she managed to do so, she said, "For us, please."

I didn't like voicing what I was thinking, but Adyson looked to be ready to harm me if I stayed quiet. "Well, if such an event were to transpire, and we were not to react to it, then there are two possibilities as to our ultimate fate. The first is that we would run out of supplies and starve. The second, and more likely, is that we would be tracked down by Doofenshmirtz and hauled off to wherever it is he is holding the rest of the Resistance."

Adyson looked smug at getting me to corroborate what she'd been saying.

"You said it yourself," she said in a tone going perfectly with her expression. "If we just sit around and wait for Isabella to come save us, then we're going to starve or be captured."

"That is not what I-"

She ignored my interjection.

"And what's more," she said. "Our friends are currently locked up in a Doofenshmirtz prison. As we speak, he is probably hideously torturing them, and may have already executed a few. If we wait too long to rescue them, they'll probably all be dead."

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

"Come on," she begged me. "This is a hotel; somebody must have left a wig and some makeup in here somewhere. No one would recognize you!"

There was another silence.

I sighed. I knew when I was beaten.

"Alright," I said. "We'll do it."

She grinned. "Excellent," she replied. "Now let's go find some food."

**Isabella-2's POV**

I stuck my head out of the alcove I was sheltering in and took a quick look down the hallway. Staggered down the length of it were five turrets sticking out of the ceiling, and probably a couple more I couldn't see.

In less time than it took for the turrets to swivel in my direction, I leaned out and blasted one of them with my laser rifle. Just after I pulled back into my alcove, the turrets turned to where I had been and started firing.

A smirk crossed my face. They were fast, but I was faster. Then I took a look at the energy gauge on my laser rifle, and the smirk left. I got ammo for my rifle from looting NormBot energy cells. Since there weren't any NormBots here, I was starting to run low.

Phineas pulled a small metal ball from his pocket and threw it into the hallway. It beeped once, and then the turrets fell silent.

I cautiously stuck my head around the corner. Nothing shot at me.

"What was... That?" I asked Phineas. He smiled.

"Something me and Ferb put together," he said. "We call it a 'pulse grenade.' You can only use it once, but it disables all electronics around it."

"Nice."

I looked back down the hallway. It ended in a bank vault-style door, complete with the crank to open it.

"I think that's it," I said. "Past that door, there should be a storeroom with a lot of hidden technology, with the diamond cutter in there with it."

"Do you still have the molecule scrambler, Baljeet?" Phineas asked. Baljeet pulled the orb out of his backpack and handed it over. Phineas activated it. I felt that weird "atoms vibrating away" sensation again, and then it cleared.

I moved my hand to the wall. It went through. A thought suddenly struck me.

"If we're intangible, how is it we aren't getting pulled into the Earth?" I asked. Phineas took a moment to consider my question, and then answered "I dunno. Probably best not to question it."

I nodded. He had a good point.

The molecule scrambler wore off just after we passed through the door. I stopped as soon as we were through, and just stared.

**Perry's POV**

"They're in the storeroom!" Monogram yelled. "Carl, send in the agents! NOW!"

**Isabella-2's POV**

There wasn't a word in any language to describe a place like this. It was so absolutely filled with devices, I wouldn't have been able to see the walls if they didn't extend a good five hundred or so feet upwards. Even up there, the room was still filled with various junk, some hanging from the ceiling and others stacked all the way up. The place almost inspired a kind of reverence.

I whispered something to myself in Hebrew, a phrase I didn't know the meaning of myself, but that I'd sometimes heard my mother say. The others seemed to share my awe, considering that none of them were speaking and that Baljeet seemed to have fainted.

"I hope they have an indexing system," Phineas said.

"Everything just looks so haphazard, though," First Dimension me said. "It looks like all this stuff just got tossed in."

Baljeet, still lying on the floor, gave a low moan.

"Also, someone should probably wake him up."

Nobody seemed in a hurry to do so, or to do anything but stare.

Eventually, I managed to pull my gaze away and locked the door behind us.

"Alright, we need to get going," I said. "It's probably only a matter of time before more of those strangely anthropomorphic animals come back to try and take us down."

Reluctantly, the others stopped staring at the storeroom and looked back at me. Buford kicked Baljeet in the ribs, which seemed to bring him back to the world of the living. He stood up, wincing and holding his side.

"Alright," I said. "We're not going to find the diamond cutter if we don't find some sort of sorting method these people have. I'm willing to bet they have some computers with information on that. Baljeet?"

With a wince, he pulled a smallish, geiger-counter looking device from his backpack and held it up.

"I'm picking up something over... there," he said, pointing to somewhere along the near wall. We walked over and started looking the area over. Our efforts were rewarded soon enough, with a minimalistic computer terminal built into the wall. Baljeet walked over and started typing into it.

After about a minute, he asked "You are looking for the diamond cutter, correct? Not anything else? Because they seem to have a lot of really, really cool stuff in here."

I shook my head. He gave me a pleading look, which I ignored. He sighed and turned back to the computer.

"Alright," he said after a few minutes. "According to the computer, their sorting system uses a mix of the Latin and Greek alphabets and arabic numerals- our regular numbers. It says the diamond cutter is item number Beta-3-CB-50194."

"Nice work, Baljeet," I said. "Of course, having that long and complicated reference number doesn't do us much good if it doesn't give us any clue how find the diamond cutter!"

"I am working on it!" he said indignantly. "I don't think this system has been updated in the last thirty years, and it is almost incomprehensible. Try looking for some physical labels on the items."

Suddenly, a muffled "boom" came from the door we'd come in through. We all turned our heads at the sound.

"What was that?" Buford's voice almost seemed to tremble, which I'd never heard it do before.

"I think they're trying to blow the door," I said. I heard my voice tremble a bit too. "Baljeet?"

"This is a reference computer," he replied. "I can look, but I don't think this has access to the security system."

I muttered something unkind under my breath.

"Alright. Does anyone besides Baljeet have training in hand-to-hand combat?"

All of Isabella-1's Fireside Girls raised their hands. I mentally slapped myself. They were the Fireside Girls; of course they knew how to fight.

"Anyone else?" I asked. Then I looked around and realized Phineas was gone. "Wait, where's Phineas?"

Everyone looked around. No one seemed to know where he was. "Phineas?" Isabella-1 called out.

Suddenly, he poked his weirdly triangular head around the corner of a shelf. "Over here!" he called out breathlessly. "Check out what I found!"

He held up what looked like a bird-themed suit of armor."It's the Beak outfit from four summers ago!"

"The what?" I asked.

"Oh, I guess you wouldn't know about that," Phineas said. "Well, four years ago, me and Ferb designed a robotic suit to use on our extreme skate track to keep from dying. But we ended up becoming a superhero instead. I controlled the torso and Ferb took the legs."

"But you don't have Ferb here," I said. "Are you just going to use the top half?"

"Oh, no, the suit seems to have been modified. It's remote-controlled now. Watch!"

He pulled something that looked like a video game controller out of his pocket and pushed a button on it. The suit jumped out of his arms and sprung into an upright position. He wiggled one of the joysticks, and it started waving its arms.

"That is neat," I said. "What else can it do?"

"To my recollection, it can fly, has grappling hooks, and can lift about fifteen tons.. I'm not sure what other modifications these people made, though. How on Earth did they get it in the first place? We never did find it after we were done being the Beak."

Another loud "boom" came from the door.

"Crap," I said. "I think they're about to break through. Alright, I think we can take these animals one on one, but they're probably going to outnumber us. Phineas, can you set the... whatever you called that thing to auto-defense?"

"Does a resistor impede the flow of electric current?"

"... I'll take that as a yes. Alright, we need to find another computer, one that's more defensible. They'll probably spread out to try and take advantage of their numbers. How can we..."

My voice trailed off as I spotted a sign. I leaned in to read it.

"You don't say..." I whispered to myself, a smile on my face.

**Perry's POV**

**About thirty seconds earlier**

Perry was starting to have second thoughts about this.

Yes, he realized the need for security. Yes, he knew that anyone outside the agency gaining (or, in this case, regaining) knowledge of it would be a massive security breach. But this... he didn't know if he could fight his owners.

None of the other agents seemed to have any similar qualms... except Pinky. He always looked nervous, thanks to his constant vibrating, but he looked more nervous than usual now. Perry laid a hand on his shoulder and made his chattering noise.

No one had ever been able to explain exactly how animals, but not humans, were able to communicate with each other with the weird noises they made. Perry's chattering had said, more or less, "I know how you feel."

"As in, having to fight your owner?" Pinky asked with a bark.

"Yeah. Exactly."

"Do you have to fight two of them?"

Perry opened his mouth to reply, then realized that Pinky had a point. Ferb was off on a date with Vanessa, so he only had to fight Phineas. Pinky only had Isabella, but now there were two of her.

He leaned over and gave Pinky a reassuring pat on the back. He thought it was reassuring, anyways. He couldn't be sure.

With a blast, the two agents trying to blow open the door finally succeeded. When the smoke and assorted dust cleared, the door was gone, along with most of the surrounding wall. Agent B and agent G were the first in, followed shortly thereafter by all of the others. With reluctance, Perry put aside his inhibitions and charged in.

Then he stopped, and looked around. The other agents did the same.

The kids were gone!

* * *

Where are they? I'll never tell... At least not until the next chapter.

Many thanks to everyone for reviewing:

**FanFicCriTicTheThird: **Sorry if this one's a bit short too.

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **Well, I guess you do, but I don't think much critical happened in this one, either. Next one will, though (or maybe the one after that).

**DetectiveLion:** Thanks! So did I.

**14AmyChan: **Indeed.

**fan-like-irving:** I know, right? They could do so much for the agency.

**Green-Finch24601: **Uhhh... Acutally, that was a typo. It was supposed to be "Then Candace." But thanks!

Everyone else: PLEASE review!


	7. Chapter 7: An Unexpected Complication

/sigh/ Alright, I know I said I'd update in two weeks. I am VERY, VERY SORRY that I didn't hold to that. I had major writer's block on Isabella's POV, and it took me forever to get through it. I'm also sorry it's so short for such a long wait; the next one will be longer, I promise! (no such promises about the wait, though. Might be forever, might be two weeks. I'd bet on longer than that, though.)

Also, an announcement: I've decided that this story is going to have several sequels, some of which may be crossovers. I would like some feedback on how many you'd be fine with reading. PM me, or (preferably) say in the reviews.

Sorry to spring this on you all like this! I thought it was better than telling you when this story ended, though.

* * *

**Doofenshmirtz (First Dimension this time)' POV**

Norm's distinctive metallic footfalls announced his presence. "Whatcha doin'?" he asked. Doofenshmirtz looked up from his inator long enough to glare at him.

"You know perfectly well what I'm 'doin',' Norm," he said. "Why are you asking me again?"

"It was for the benefit of the readers," Norm replied, apparently unfazed by his creators annoyance. "The last time you introduced your inator, the author ended the scene before the readers could see what it was."

Doofenshmirtz grumbled and got up from his work.

"That lazy bum," he muttered under his breath. "This..." he said, pausing for dramatic effect. "... is the Other Dimension-inator!"

As he finished his sentence, he raised his arms and tried to put on an evil smile. Unfortunately, it ended up looking more comical than anything else, and any remaining drama in the scene was destroyed when a mosquito flew down his windpipe.

"An Other Dimension-inator?" Norm asked, apparently not noticing or ignoring Doofenshmirtz's sudden coughing fit. "Is that anything like the one you built four years ago?"

"What are you talking about, Norm?" Doofenshmirtz replied when he managed to stop coughing. "This is the first of its kind."

"No, it isn't. You built another one four-"

"Alright!" Doofenshmirtz barked. "I'm sorry I asked. Geez, even when you're doing double duty as my nemesis and my assistant, you still talk too much.

"But-"

"Perry the platypus never interrupted me," Doofenshmirtz continued. "Is it too much to ask for you to do the same?"

Even though his face was painted on, Norm's expression seemed to drop.

"That's better," Doofenshmirtz said, and turned back to his inator. "Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted-" he turned to glare at Norm as he said that. "This is my Other Dimension-inator! I got the idea for it when I was in the library, reading up on my quantum physics. I read that our universe is composed of an infinite number of alternate dimensions, arranged in circles, with the energy flowing clockwise between each dimension in each circle. Each circle has an extremely large number of dimensions, and there are an infinite number of circles, stacked on top of each other. And since there are an infinite number of dimensions, anything that can happen will happen in at least one of them. Interestingly, not many people are aware that there are multiple circles; most are only aware of the circle our dimension is in.

"Now, I'm sure you're wondering, 'but Doof! This is all very interesting, but how can you use it to take over the Tri-State Area?'" He chuckled. "Well, I figure that somewhere among those infinite dimensions, there must be one with a planet made of solid gold." Norm raised his hand. "Save all questions for the end, please," Doofenshmirtz said. "Now, I am going to find this planet, sell the gold, and use it to buy the Tri-State Area!" He laughed maniacally as he finished his evil monologue. "Alright, I'll take questions now."

"I have a concern," Norm said. "Wouldn't injecting such a large amount of gold into the world economy immensely devalue all other gold and indirectly destroy the world economy?"

Doofenshmirtz waved Norm's concerns away.

"Nah, gold always holds it's value. I read that in a financial magazine somewhere. Anyways, what say we give this baby a test run?"

"Did you put the self-destruct button in?"

"What? Of course I did, Norm! What kind of inator would be complete without one?"

"But-"

"Silence!"

Doofenshmirtz walked over to the Other Dimension-inator and pushed a button on the control panel. It buzzed and there was a brief flash of light, which dissipated almost instantaneously.

"It's the self-destruct button!" Norm exclaimed. "The entire inator is wired through it. That's why it isn't working."

"Oh, suddenly you're an inator expert now, are you?" Doofenshmirtz asked sarcastically. "And how might you know that?"

"When you built the first Other Dimension-inator, two kids-"  
"Right, yes, the first Other Dimension-inator I made four years ago. Never mind."

He sighed.

"If it'll make you shut up, then fine, I'll take out the self-destruct button. After that, I can start the real repair work."

Five Minutes Later

Doofenshmirtz held a red button labeled "self-destruct" in his hand. He held it up to Norm and said "There. Are you happy now?"

"Yes. The Other Dimension-inator should function perfectly now."

Doofenshmirtz rolled his eyes.

"Whatever you say, Norm, whatever you say."

He pressed the activation button again and stood back to watch it fail. It made the same buzzing noise as before, but this time a thin line of green light snaked out like poison gas. It stopped in front of the Other Dimension-inator and began swirling together into a green disk. As it grew larger, it grew clearer, too, until it grew completely transparent, showing a purple-colored room.

"Well?" Norm asked. Doofenshmirtz shrugged him off.

"Yeah, you were right," he said nonchalantly. "It was bound to happen eventually."

Again, without changing his expression, Norm looked crestfallen.

Taking care not to touch the edges of the portal, Doofenshmirtz stepped through. Once he was through, he stopped and gasped in amazement.

**Isabella's POV (again, First Dimension now)**

I leaned over my Second Dimension self's shoulder to see what she was looking at. There was a brass plaque with the word "teleporters" embossed on it with an arrow under it.

"You know, it really shouldn't surprise me that they have those here," I said. "Phineas and Ferb built a set of these last year."

My Second Dimension self didn't immediately respond. She walked over to the next shelf and leaned around the corner. She came back with a grin on her face.

"So, you could operate one, right?" she asked.

Phineas looked nervous at her question.

"Ummm..." he said. "Well, maybe. But I'm not sure how much control I can exert over the jump with a system I'm not familiar with. If they have one similar enough to the ones we built, I might be able to work it."

"We'll worry about that when we come to it," she replied, then grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him over to the shelves.

I felt a stab of jealousy. Phineas was mine. It didn't matter that she was me; he was mine. No girl besides me was allowed to lay a finger on him. Not even another me.

Of course, the fact that she was me probably also meant she had no more chance with him than I did. Still, I followed with one eye on her.

Since I'd already seen the rest of the warehouse, this particular section didn't seem all that impressive to me. Like all the others I'd seen, this shelf was piled high with mysterious gadgets. Some looked like the teleporters you might see in Space Adventure; others looked like something that had fallen off a UFO.

"Do any of these look familiar?" my Second Dimension self asked Phineas. He looked around the shelves until his face lit up and he shouted "There! That's the one we built last summer."

I followed his gaze. Close to the base of the shelf, there was something that looked like Phineas and Ferb's teleporters from last summer. After the Beak suit, this didn't really surprise me. It just confirmed what I'd already suspected: whoever the O.W.C.A. was, they'd been keeping tabs on us.

"They've been watching us..." I said.

"When this is all over, we really need to see what these people want with us," Phineas replied.

The other me pulled the teleporter off the shelf. In the distance, there was the sound of a solid metal door being torn off its hinges and flung through several shelves of advanced tech.

"Crud," she said. "They've made it through. We need to get this working and find the-"

She cut herself off suddenly. She looked down at the teleporter and her brow furrowed in thought.

"Baljeet," she called out. "Do you still remember the identification code for the diamond cutter?"

"Beta-3-CB-50194," he recited. She shoved the teleporter in his face as soon as he started talking. I saw that it had a little LCD display on it, like the kind you see on cheap calculators, and a really weird keyboard.

"Alright, punch that in," she said. "I think it's been modified to take you to items in the warehouse."

He took it nervously.

"Are you sure about that?" he asked. "Because if you're wrong, it is possible that we will be teleported into a wall or into space or something."

The sound of hundred of animal feet could be heard just around the corner.

"There's no time to worry about that!" the other me exclaimed. "The agents are almost here!"

Baljeet typed in the code and looked away as he hit the activation button. There was a brief flash of light and in the space of a moment, we'd gone somewhere else.

This would have impressed me more if Phineas and Ferb hadn't already done it about twenty times already. I looked around us. Wherever we'd gone to, it was still in the warehouse, and didn't really seem all that different from where we'd just been.

No. There was one difference. The shelves were empty. In the teleporter aisle, they'd been filled to bursting. There wasn't a single item on the shelves here.

"Is there something wrong with the teleporter?" I asked. "No," Baljeet said. He pointed behind me and said "Look over there."

I looked where he was pointing. There was something I hadn't noticed; a white crate that seemed to blend in with the shelf. It was easy to miss. In raised metal type, the serial number "Beta-3-CB-50194" was visible.

Baljeet walked up cautiously and put a hand on it. There was a beep and a click and the top of the crate slid away.

No one moved.

The sides of the crate collapsed away. The one Baljeet was facing fell on him, and he only barely caught it and avoided being crushed. With a grunt of exertion (which sounded pretty weird coming from him), he pushed it off to the side.

The diamond cutter honestly wasn't that impressive. It looked like a camera tripod with a circular pod where the camera should be. I assumed that was where the diamond went.

Second Dimension me fumbled with her satchel for a moment and pulled out the diamond to be cut. She walked up to it, opened the pod, and gently placed it within. When she closed the pod, it started emitting a low hum, like the heel of a sock held against a moving treadmill.

"Alright," she said. "Now there's nothing to do but wait."

"How long are we going to wait?" I asked.

"As long as it takes."

* * *

It's done! Finally!

Many thanks to the following for reviewing:

**fan-like-irving: **Thanks! I liked the chapter, too.

**Lucy Case** **(guest):** Well, I'll try to update soon. I can't make any promises about Phineas-2, though. Sorry!

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **Yeah, I know I kind of changed it on you at the last minute. I thought this ending was better than anything I had before, though.

**Nehamee: **I know! I can't wait to really get into the rest of the story.

**14AmyChan: **Nope, not invisible! Just gone.

**FanFicCriticTheThird: **Thanks. I thought the current reference was a bit geeky, but I thought it worked well, so I kept it.

And, to all of you who are following but not reviewing:

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE REVIEW! I'M BEGGING YOU HERE! IT IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT TO MY SENSE OF SELF-WORTH!


	8. Chapter 8: From Bad to Worse

It's done! And in a semi-timely fashion, to boot! I'm so proud of myself!

* * *

**Doofenshmirtz-1's POV**

"Woah..." Doofenshmirtz said in an overawed tone of voice. "Whoever designed this room had really great taste!"

The floor was the exact same tone of purple as the exterior of his own building. The walls featured the word "Doofenshmirtz" running up in diagonal stripes, against a background of light yellow. He looked up at the ceiling and the gasped again as he saw what was on it: a holographic image of his face, staring down at whoever happened to be in the room (in this case, just him). Strangely, his left eye was replaced by a patch with a mysterious scar running over it.

The view of the sky from a nearby window caught his eye. It was colored purple and pink, presumably from air pollution. He stepped over to get a better look, and this time just skipped the gasping and went straight to slack-jawed amazement. The urban landscape below featured all manner of strangely designed buildings, most of which he fell in love with instantly, but that wasn't what impressed him here.

Images of himself, again with the eyepatch and scar, filled the city below him. Just under the window, for instance, was an enormous, grinning statue of him in what seemed to be a pose of self-assured confidence. Beyond that, electronic billboards floated past the strange buildings, each featuring various images of his face.

"Sir?" someone said behind him. He turned around and saw Major Monogram, dressed in a strange purple suit. "What are you doing out-"

Monogram stopped as soon as he realized who he was talking to.

"... Where is your eyepatch, sir?" he asked.

"What is it with that eyepatch?" Doofenshmirtz replied. "That statue and all those pictures of my face have it. I mean, did someone just decide I'd look better with it? Because I think they may be right; it looks way cool!"

Monogram blinked in confusion.

"I don't underst-" he began, and then cut himself off. A moment of silence followed as his face changed from confusion to cowed understanding

"... You're from the Other Dimension, aren't you?" he said in realization.

"Well, duh!" Doofenshmirtz said. "How do you think I got here? I built an Other Dimension-inator so I could find another dimension with an Earth made out of solid gold and sell it. But since somebody seems to have conquered this alternate Tri-State Area for me in anticipation of my arrival, I supposed it'll do for now."

The blood drained for Major Monogram's face, which Doofenshmirtz took no notice of. Monogram pulled his communicator off of his belt, toggled it to the channel for Second Dimension Doofenshmirtz, and whispered into it "I think we may have a situation here, sir."

Unfortunately, Doofenshmirtz-2 took a moment too long to realize that, if his most trusted servant was whispering, there was probably a good reason for him to whisper too.

"What are you bothering me for?" he shouted, running water audible in the background, and then a creak, after which the noise stopped. "I'm in the middle of a shower, and if this isn't-"

Then the Doofenshmirtz from the First Dimension heard his counterpart's voice through the communicator.

"Is that me?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Oh, that's what's up with all the statues! There's another me here, and he's the one who conquered this Tri-State Area! I guess I'm cool with sharing power, as long as it's with me."

There was silence in the room; an excited, somewhat naive silence on Doofenshmirtz-1's part, and an utterly stunned silence with Doofenshmirtz-2 and Monogram.

"Is that..." Doof-2 said after a moment, his voice trailing off before he could speak further.

"It is, sir," his indentured executive assistant replied. "Do you want me to bring him to you?"

Doofenshmirtz-2 seemed to be a state of shock for a few moments after hearing Monogram speak. He sounded like he was trying to form words, but that his mouth wasn't responding to his mind.

"Sir?" Monogram said in a concerned tone.

"I..." Doofenshmirtz said, still sounding stunned and a little distant. Then he seemed to regain his conviction, and said "I mean... Yes, yes, of course bring him to me, you ingrate! Now! I don't care if you have to run over small children getting to me, I want to see me! NOW!"

Monogram sighed, apparently relieved that his boss was back to normal.

"Right away, sir," he said, and clicked off his communicator. He turned to Doofenshmirtz-1, who was staring at him in apparent amazement.

"You're..." he said, and then stopped, apparently having fallen prey to the same affliction as his Second Dimension counterpart. He opened his mouth, and then closed it again without saying anything.

"You..." he finally got out when he seemed to have recovered. "You're Francis Monogram!"

Monogram sighed, this time sounding more exasperated than relieved.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I am."

"And you're..." Once again, Doofenshmirtz-1 seemed to have been stunned into silence. "You're, like, my secretary or something!"

"I am not your secretary, sir. We went over this the last time you were here. I am an 'indentured executive assistant.'"

"My... wait, what do you mean, 'the last time I was here?'"

"You don't remember?" Monogram's tone of voice changed again, this time from exasperation to confusion.

"I'm pretty sure I'd remember a place as awesome as this!" Doofenshmirtz said, raising his arms in an attempt to emphasize his point, but like his attempt to appear dramatic with his Other Dimension-inator earlier, he failed miserably. In this case, instead of having a small insect flying down his throat, he hit his hand on a lamp mounted on the wall, knocking it loose and sending it flying into the ceiling with a crash. Monogram-2 didn't seem to notice, lost in the same stupor that had recently claimed both Doofenshmirtz's.

"You... You don't remember?" he asked. The confusion in his voice was more evident now, though Doofenshmirtz-1 failed to notice it, busy nursing his injured hand as he was.

"Well, yeah," he said. "This is my first time here. I wish I'd found it earlier, it looks like a nice place to live."

"Well, that is interesting," he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "But we'd better get you over to Supreme Overlord Doofenshmirtz. He's currently inspecting the captured Resistance bunker."

"A Resistance?" Doofenshmirtz-1 asked excitedly. "I get my own Resistance? Man, this dimension is awesome!"

Monogram didn't speak much on the hover car ride. Doofenshmirtz-1, on the other hand, screamed in excitement at almost everything, from the way the common people ran away at the sight of his car to the NormBots who shot anyone who failed to get out of the way. When the car arrived at the bunker, Doofenshmirtz lept out and started looking around, apparently for the bunker entrance. The area the hover car had stopped in was a stretch of abandoned buildings, of which there were many in Danville.

"So, where is this bunker?" he asked. "Is there, like, some giant steel door that opens into an abandoned nuclear shelter?"

"You've been playing too much Fallout," Monogram said. "The entrance is somewhat less obtrusive than that."

He walked over to what might have been an abandoned store and opened the wooden door into it. In spite of its rotted and decayed appearance, it opened smoothly and without noise.

"Oh," Doofenshmirtz-1 said. "That looks more like an abandoned store than a bunker."

"That's why it took us so long to find it."

Doofenshmirtz hesitantly followed Monogram into the crumbling building. The interior seemed normal enough for a store that had been left to rot for two years. The ceiling had caved in in several places, the shelves were completely stripped of all merchandise, and the stench of decay was all-pervading.

"Ummm..." Doofenshmirtz-1 said. "I was under the impression that there was a Resistance bunker, not a Resistance decaying building."

This time, Monogram just ignored him. He walked over to the cashiers desk and pressed a specific sequence of keys on the cash register.

The floor began to rumble. Doofenshmirtz-1 looked down nervously and quickly moved to the far side of the room. This proved to be a wise decision on his part, because just after he did so, the spot where he'd been standing fell away, revealing a long metal staircase.

Monogram didn't seem to view this as anything special, and just started down the stairs. Doofenshmirtz, on the other hand, was absolutely amazed.

"Woah..." he whispered. "This is almost as cool as a giant Vault door."

"I'm glad to hear you think so, sir," Monogram called up from below. "Could you please hurry up?"

With a start, Doofenshmirtz-1 ran down after him.

Doofenshmirtz-2 was waiting for them at the bottom of the staircase, pacing like a caged animal. When he saw his First Dimension counterpart, he ran over to him and started looking him over.

"You..." he said, apparently lost for words, a rare occurrence for him. An expression of awe had pasted itself across his features, bringing with it an almost reverent silence.

Unfortunately, the First Dimension Doofenshmirtz suffered from no such silence. "Oh, my god," he exclaimed. "You're me!"

Doofenshmirtz-2 looked over at Monogram. His expression changed from reverence to something a bit closer to annoyance.

"Is he always like this?" he asked. Monogram just nodded. "Hm. Well, I suppose I could learn to put up with it."

He turned back to his First Dimension self. "So, me," he said. "It's been a while. Four years, if memory serves."

"Why do you people keep saying that?" Doofenshmirtz-1 said. "This is my first time here. I told your secretary already-"

"Indentured executive assistant!" Monogram interrupted.

"-I would remember a place as awesome as this!" Doofenshmirtz-1 continued, without taking notice of Monogram's outburst. "I mean, a whole Tri-State Area that already obeys me? It's like a dream come true!"

"Um, a Tri-State Area that obeys me," Doofenshmirtz-2 corrected. "I am the one who went to the troubled of conquering it."

"Well, yeah, but you're me, and therefore, this Tri-State Area obeys me as well!"

"Hmm..." Doofenshmirtz-2 seemed skeptical. "That can wait until later. For now, I have a lot to ask you about."

He put his arm around his First Dimension Self's shoulders, and led him into his office. There was a feeling of something monumental occurring, something that would have far-felt repercussions. Nothing good could come of this.

* * *

Well, that was ominous. Who knows what will happen next? Only me... And I'm not telling!

Not really. I'm not actually sure what's going to happen next, either.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed:

**fan-like-irving: **I'll try. I got this one done, didn't I?

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **Don't tell anyone, but that's actually going to be a bit of a big thing later on. And I hope this chapter's exciting, too!

**14AmyChan:** If Bully Bromance Breakup is anything to go by, not too long...

**Green-Finch24601: **Now I feel guilty about saying that to get reviews (which isn't going to prevent me from doing it again)... But thanks. In the next few chapters, I think stuff is really going to start happening.

**TheCartoonFanatic01: **Well, I should certainly hope you've read it, if you're reviewing. But thank you so much for reviewing! It means so much to me that you like this story!

**nintendgal101:** Probably the same way Phineas is going to act about Perry.


	9. Chapter 9: The Kids Are Found

**Perry's POV**

"Any progress?" Monogram asked, his face on Perry's watch. Perry shook his head and said, in the sign language they'd developed "We've done a full sweep of the first area. We haven't found anything."

Monogram sighed.

"Well, I didn't expect much at this point, anyways. Carl hasn't made much progress on finding the location of the diamond cutter, and we still don't know how Baljeet managed it."

"I told you we should've standardized that filing system years ago!" Carl shouted from off-camera. "Quiet, Carl!" Monogram yelled back. "Anyways, keep searching," he said to Perry. "We don't think they have a way out, so just keep the entrances secure and you should be able to find them eventually."

Perry saluted and ended the call. Around him, he could hear his fellow agents scurrying around the warehouse and scanning everything in sight for life signs. The items themselves had such weird properties that they'd gotten several false positives from them already, but other than that, and the Beak robot that had taken down five of the agents before it had been destroyed, they'd found no trace of the kids.

He looked over at the aforementioned Beak robot and sighed (or made the closest platypus equivalent). That was definitely going to start them asking questions. If his owners hadn't already realized his secret, they would soon. He didn't know what he was going to say to them- "Sorry for lying to you for the last ten years? Look on the bright side- at least you won't remember any of this soon!"

They'd freaked out the last time something like this had happened. They'd been understanding after he told them the whole story, but he didn't think they would be so inclined a second time, especially considering all the agency had put them through tonight.

The only solution he could see was to capture them and erase their memories again. After that, they could turn their attentions to the Second Dimension and see what the Isabella from it had been talking about. If Doofenshmirtz-2 really had regained power, they would need all of their considerable resources to combat him. He hadn't been an easy person to fight even the last time they had. In all likelihood, he would be even tougher now.

But first, they would need to find the kids and erase their memory. And so far, that had not proved an easy undertaking. Admittedly, they'd barely managed to search any of the massive warehouse so far, but, honestly, how far could the kids have gone? It wasn't like they had a...

A label on the wall caught his eye. He froze as he took a moment to read it, and then mentally slapped himself. It was so obvious!

He activated his watch phone and frantically dialed Major Monogram. His face came up immediately.

"What is it, Agent P?" he asked. Perry frantically signaled his response. When he was done, Monogram sat in stunned silence for a moment, and then started swearing, a bit in English, but mostly in foreign languages Perry didn't know.

"Teleporters," Monogram said through gritted teeth after he was finished swearing. "I cannot believe we didn't realize already. Alright, I'm sending Carl down to sweep for teleporter residue. Call all the agents off of the sweep and have them get ready for redeployment. We'll need them to be ready to move to the kids' position the moment Carl finds anything."

Perry saluted again and turned off his watch phone.

**Isabella-1's POV**

We all reacted differently to having nothing to do. The other me, like myself, seemed perfectly content just to stand and wait, and to talk a bit with the others. The Fireside Girls followed our lead. Baljeet was scrawling complicated physics equations in the dust on the the shelves. Whenever he finished one, Buford would rub it out and then give him a thorough noogie.

Phineas, on the other hand, had never reacted well to boredom. He was pacing up and down the aisle and twitching like a coked-out squirrel. Every once in a while, he'd look up from his pacing, let his eyes flit around the room, and then go back to pacing and coked-out-squirrel twitching. I knew Phineas got twitchy when he got bored, but not this bored. It seemed like there was something more.

I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He stopped pacing to look up at me.

"Are you alright, Phineas?" I asked. "I mean, I know you're bored and all, but is there something else bothering you?"

He stopped twitching and looked back down at the floor. He didn't say anything.

"Phineas?" I asked again. Now I was sure there was something he wasn't telling me.

"I..." he said, his voice trailing off after that one word. "It's just something dumb. It's not worth mentioning."

"Well, then it's not worth being quiet about, is it?" I said, determined to know what was wrong. "If it's something so small, just tell me it."

He was quiet again. I was about to start really pestering him when he said "Well... this organization has animal agents, right?"

"Yeah."

"And Perry goes off somewhere we don't know about every day, right?"

"... No. No, no, no, no, no. Pinky goes off every day, too, but animals do that. That doesn't mean that he's some secret agent."

Phineas was quiet again. It was starting to feel like a hackneyed device overused by a bad fanfiction writer when he spoke up again.

"I guess you're right," he said. "I just can't shake the feeling that... I don't know. That there's something about him we're forgetting."

"Don't worry about it. You guys have probably done something involving pretending Perry was a secret agent before. Besides, there's no way he could have kept it a secret for this long. We would've noticed, right?"

Phineas opened his mouth, like he was about to say something, and then stopped.

"Do you hear that?" he asked.

"Hear what?"

"I'm not sure. It's kind of like what you hear if you push your ear against a table and pound on it, only like there's about a thousand people hitting the table."

I listened for a second.

"Well, I don't hear anything," I said. "But the ground seems to be vibrating."

I gave him a second to check this, and said "And it seems to be getting worse."

In fact, only a second before, the vibration had been barely perceptible. Now the shelves were starting to rattle, and everyone else was taking notice of it. People were looking up from their conversations to see what was going on (which didn't help very much, since there wasn't much of anything to see). My Second Dimension counterpart was the first one to realize just what the noise was.

"It's the agents," she hissed. "They must have tracked us here somehow!"

"How much longer does that diamond cutter doohickey need?" Buford asked.

"I don't know! There isn't a timer or anything on it!"

"Well, does the diamond have to be all the way cut to work?" I asked.

"I..." The other me nervously looked back at the device. "I don't know. The diamond might work fine, or it might not do anything, or it might only sort of work. I'm not sure; Baljeet's the one who handled that kind of stuff."

"Well, I think we're going to have to risk it," Phineas said. The Second Dimension me hesitated for a moment, then nodded in agreement. She turned back to open the diamond cutter, and then stopped.

"How do we get the diamond out?" she asked.

The pod she'd put the diamond in seemed to have retracted into a metal sheath covering the rest of the device, taking it out of our view. There was another moment of silence in the room, except for the rumbling of the approaching agents.

"Alright, out of the way!" Buford shouted, pushing his way towards the diamond cutter. "Let Buford handle this the van Stomm way!"

He stopped in front of the machine and cracked his knuckles. Then he brought his beefy forearm down on it, reducing it to a pile of scrap metal and circuits with a large diamond shining out from the middle of the scrap heap.

The other me carefully reached down, plucked the diamond out of the mess, and put it in her satchel.

"Alright," she said. "I think it's time we-"

Then the rumbling noise stopped as the agents came around the corner. They froze as soon as they saw us.

"So..." Buford said. "Run or fight?"

"Run," the other me said. "Definitely run."

And so we did.

* * *

Thanks to everybody who took the time to review:

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **Yes. Yes, it is.

**fan-like-irving: **I'll do my best!

**14AmyChan:** Probably 'cause he is! /laughs menacingly/

**Green-Finch24601: **Thanks! I'll keep writing as long as everyone keeps reviewing. (Not really. I'll probably keep writing even if everyone forgets this story exists.)


	10. Chapter 10: Something Else Goes Wrong

****Well, it's been just about a month since I've updated. I know, I know, I suck and I'm a terrible person. I promise I'll update sooner next chapter!

/sigh/ Yeah, I don't believe it either.

* * *

Chapter X: Something Else Goes Wrong

**Monogram-1's POV**

As the pursuit unfolded on the monitors, Major Monogram leaned back in his executive chair and heaved a sigh.

"This has not been a good night, Carl," he said in an exhausted tone. "We're going to have such a mess to clean up after this is done."

"I know, sir," Carl replied. "I've been through this whole night, too, you know."

"We'll need to wipe the kids' memory, figure out what to do about the other Isabella," Monogram continued muttering, apparently not noticing that Carl had spoken. "Get the warehouse back in order, find out what all the agents' nemeses have been up to while all the agents were back recalled..."

"Don't remind me, sir. I have a lot to do myself, you know."

"And why?"

Monogram's question got Carl to look away from the monitors, looking a bit confused.

"Excuse me, sir?" he asked.

"Why?" Monogram repeated. "Why are we trying to capture these kids?"

"Well, they broke into one of our facilities. They're a security risk."

"If they broke in once, they'll probably do it again, whether or not we wipe their memories. It seems awfully inefficient to try and just capture them."  
"Well, what else do you propo..." Carl's voice trailed off as he realized just what Major Monogram was suggesting.

"No. Sir, you cannot possibly be suggesting-"

"Well, why not?" Monogram asked. "There are ways around the 'animals only' restriction- even Doofenshmirtz was an agent for a while."

Carl rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, and we both remember how well that turned out," he said. "Sir, ignoring for a moment the fact that they're not animals, they are a proven danger to the O.W.C.A.! If I may remind you, they've just broken into our headquarters, caused, by my estimates, just over half a million dollars of damage to our equipment, and may be about to get away with it!"

"Exactly!" Monogram exclaimed, a steely glint in his eyes. "They've done what so few of our enemies in the history of the O.W.C.A. have managed: broken in. They have shown abilities beyond some of our best agents. They could be an enormous asset to the agency."

Carl just stared at Monogram for a few moments, apparently trying to restrain his anger. When he regained his composure, he asked, in a hoarse tone "So, you're saying that we need to hire these kids precisely because they're a security risk?"

Monogram nodded. "That's right."

Carl closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

"Well, sir seeing as you outrank me, I have only one thing to say about this decision," he said, and pointed his finger towards the monitors. It gave a perfect view of the melee that had just broken out between some of the kids and a few agents who'd finally managed to catch up to them.

"We have attacked, harried, and generally pursued these kids every moment for the last hour or so. I'd be amazed if they made it out of this without more than a few broken bones. After what we've put them through tonight, do you honestly think any of them will be inclined to listen to us at all?"

Monogram opened his mouth to respond, then closed it after nothing came out. On the monitors, Baljeet dispersed the agents he was engaged in combat with with a roundhouse kick, and then resumed his flight. Carl glared at Monogram as he soaked in what he'd just said.

He gave a sigh. "I suppose you're right, Carl."

Carl's expression softened.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I am, sir."

Monogram looked abashedly at the floor, and then looked up again, a thought apparently having occurred to him.

"Carl, bring up their location on one of the monitors."

Carl immediately did as he was told, apparently relieved that Monogram was back to his usual stern self. Once the image was on the screen, Monogram's eyes ran over it, and he swore loudly.

"The exits," he muttered to himself. "We didn't secure the exits! We put too much stake on the agents capturing them in the initial strike."

Having realized the gravity of the situation, Carl immediately started up the warehouse security system controls.

"Which doors, sir?" he asked. Monogram took a few moments to look around the screens, and then listed off a series of letter and number serial codes. Once he was done, his eyes kept flitting between the map of the kids position and the video feed from the agents' chase. On the screen showing the latter, the door he'd just listed off came into view. It began closing, but too slowly.

"Faster, Carl!" Monogram exclaimed. Carl didn't respond, too busy already carrying out his orders. As the kids drew closer to the door, it closed more and more, until only a small slit at the bottom was still open. The tension in the room was palpable, both Monogram and Carl staring at the screen as if afraid they would would miss some crucial piece of information if they so much as blinked.

As the door thudded to a close and the agents swarmed up to it, neither of them spoke for the better part of thirty seconds.

Finally, Monogram broke the silence with a long series of swear words.

Carl, rather wisely, chose not to interrupt Monogram's rant.

When he finished, he just stood there, panting heavily.

"Now, that's half a million dollars of property damage that we have nothing to show for," he said in a gravelly tone.

"Um, sir?" Carl asked.

"What?" Monogram asked angrily. "What is it?"

In lieu of a response, Carl pointed at the screen. Monogram followed his gaze.

His expression began to soften.

"Well," he said. "Perhaps tonight wasn't a total loss after all."

**Isabella-2's POV**

Two minutes later

I finally pulled to a stop in the metal corridor, allowing everybody else to do the same.

"Alright," I said, panting. "We've probably made it far enough away now."

Once I'd gotten my breath back, I walked down the hallway and did a quick headcount of the other assembled kids. When I was finished, I froze, and then did it again.

"Ah, crud," I exclaimed. "Where's Buford?"

* * *

Thanks to all of you reviewed!

**14AmyChan: **Oh, just you wait. The worst is yet to come. Not for a while, but it will come.

**Sleeping Kangaroo: **I'm considering making the metaphor of a small animal on drugs a running joke in this story.

**fan-like-irving: **Well, I can't tell you anything, but don't worry, you won't be disappointed.

**Concerned Guest (anonymous): **If you're going to be addicted to something, I would recommend something a bit more reliable than my fic update schedule. Like Mountain Dew!  
But keep reviewing anyways!

**FanFicCriTicTheThird: **Well, I'll see if you can guess before then. Of course, I hope I don't make it too obvious...

**random rebel (anonymous): **Thanks! I like my story, too, but it's always nice to have someone else tell me it, too.

**CendrawashiError: **I know. If these people care enough to read the story, why can't they care enough to review? THEY'RE SO CRUEL

**PNFAA LOVR (anonymous): **Don't worry, I will!

Anyway, that's it for now! Review, please! It's good for my mental health!

... Please. I'm begging you.


	11. Chapter 11: Strife and Suspicion

Alright, I'm _really_ sorry I took so long with this chapter (again) but I'm not going to promise I'll have a better update time with the next one because we'll all know that I'll be lying.

Also, an announcement for anyone who notices/cares: I'm changing all the POV writing to third person, because it's a lot easier to write than first person.

Thanks for sticking with me, everybody!

* * *

**Isabella-1**

"YOU DID WHAT?!"

"I can't watch everyone all the time! And why do you expect me to notice he was missing if none of you noticed either?"

"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE LEADER HERE! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE KEEPING AN EYE ON EVERYBODY!"

"Um, guys?" Phineas asked nervously. "Maybe we should wait until we've made it out of here to start bickering." Neither of the Isabellas listened to him.

"Well, I'm trying my best here!" Isabella-2 yelled at her First Dimension counterpart. "What's your best idea to get him back?"

"Guys?" Phineas said, his voice beginning to rise a little bit. He still didn't get much notice.

"OH, SO NOW IT'S MY FAULT?" Isabella-1 screamed, taking no notice of Phineas. "IN CASE YOU HADN'T NOTICED, YOU'RE THE ONE WHO TOOK US IN HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!"

"GUYS!" Phineas screamed, his outburst finally silencing the two Isabellas. "This is not the time for finger-pointing or name-calling. Yeah, the O.W.C.A. has Buford. But yelling and accusing each other is not going to get him back. If we want to do that, we need to start working together."

Each of the Isabellas stood glaring at each other.

"Fine," Isabella-1 said through clenched teeth. "This can wait until we have Buford back."

Phineas sighed. "Alright, that'll have to do. Now, the first thing we have to do is find out just where they've taken Buford. Baljeet?"

Baljeet pulled his computer detector out of his pocket and waved it around for a few seconds.

"That way," he said, pointing to a room down the hallway. "There should be one in there."

Phineas walked forward silently and looked around the doorway.

"He's right," he said. "And the room's clear."

Everyone else followed him in, but Isabella-1 stayed behind, Adyson with her. As Isabella-2 walked past her First Dimension self, they shot each other scowls.

Once the rest of the group was in the room, Adyson turned to Isabella and asked "Alright, what's going on?"

Isabella turned and asked "What?"

Adyson folded her arms over her chest and said "You know what I'm talking about. You just went nuts at that other you. I don't know why, but I know it wasn't about Buford."

"Oh, really?" Isabella asked. "Why is that?"

"You've never been any closer to Buford than the rest of us are," she said. "But none of us exploded at the other you about him getting left behind. This isn't about him. There's something else, and I think I know what it is."

Isabella's face flushed red. "There is not something else!" she exclaimed. "Buford's part of our group, and she got him left behind. I'm just concerned about all of us, is all."

"Really?"

"... Yeah."

Adyson stood in silence for a moment.

"No," she said. "I think I know what this about."

Isabella's face, already a deep crimson, flushed even redder. She seemed to realize just what Adyson was insinuating.

"I... No, it's not-"

"This is about Phineas, isn't it?"

Isabella opened her mouth, then closed it again. She tried to speak, presumably to refute Adyson's accusations, but her vocal cords betrayed her and did nothing but stammer.

Adyson nodded in satisfaction.

"You think that you've got competition for him," she stated. "There's another you here, her Phineas is dead, and you're afraid she'll try to take him. It's not hard to guess, Fearless Leader."

Isabella stammered again, then bowed her head in defeat and sat down on the cold metal floor. Adyson sat down next to her and put her arm around her.

"You're right, Adyson," Isabella said in a defeated tone. "It's just... I've never had much success with Phineas, and she just seems so much more... I don't know, more savvy than me. She seems more like someone he would go for than me."

"But you're the same person!"

"Genetically, maybe. But she's spent years fighting in a resistance movement against a tyrannical dictator, probably has all sorts of skills I don't, and is just... She just seems so much cooler than me."

Adyson leaned over and put her arms around Isabella.

"Well," she said. "I can think of at least one thing you have over her."

Isabella sniffed.

"What's that?" she asked.

"You've actually spent time with Phineas. Hers has been dead for two years."

Isabella sniffed.

"Alright," she conceded. "I'll give you that much."

Adyson gave a little smile, stood up, and offered Isabella her hand.

"Come on, Fearless Leader," she said. "Let's go see what Baljeet's found out."

Baljeet-2

Baljeet pulled himself behind the corner of a nearby building and nervously adjusted his wig. He pulled a walkie-talkie out of his pocket and whispered "Are you sure about this, Adyson?"

"It's a bit late for second thoughts," came Adyson's response. "You probably should have brought this up before we sent you in.

"Now, let's go over your disguise one last time. Say something British."

"Um..." Baljeet said hesitantly. "... Would you care for a spot of tea?"

"Good," Adyson said. "But you're still separating your words too much."

She gave a tired sigh.

"... Could you try using a contraction?"

Baljeet gave a gasp of disbelief. "I cannot!" he exclaimed. "Contractions are what you get when you tear two perfectly good words aparts and stitch them back together!"

"Baljeet, normal people use contractions!"

"As you may have noticed, I am not a normal person!"

"Exactly! We need you to seem like one so you can get in there unnoticed!"

Baljeet grimaced and gritted his teeth.

"I... I can't."

Baljeet had the feeling that Adyson gave him an approving nod.

"Very good. Now, tell me what you see?"

He slowly looked around the corner at the sumptuous building ahead. People were streaming in, carrying boxes of various sizes and shapes out of a few vehicles labeled "Hungry Platypus Catering Service."

"Well, they are definitely getting ready for something," he said. "From what I can see, it looks to be something involving lots of food. That would indicate they are having a party soon."

"Do you think you can get in?"

Baljeet looked over at the trucks the workers were unloading crates off of. From what he could tell, the workers seemed to come back. However, there seemed to be a long delay between when one person walked away from the truck and when another walked up.

When someone else came for another crate, Baljeet saw that their clothes were just as ramshackle and poorly-maintained as his own. With a sigh, he brought the walkie-talkie to his lips and said "Yes, I can get in. I will... I'll radio you when I get out."

Adyson had time to say "Nice contraction, Baljeet," before he turned off the walkie-talkie.

As one person walked away from the trucks clutching a crate labeled "stewed lark tongues," Baljeet slipped over and picked up another one. None of the laborers noticed his presence, nor did the armed guards.

As he walked in further, Baljeet had to keep himself from stopping to gawk at the inside of the house- no, the mansion. The place was enormous. The entrance hall alone easily dwarfed his old house in the suburbs. Walking through it was like walking through a Roman arch; it made you feel like a bug.

Milling around the entrance was a rich variety of people. Almost everything about them made a stunning contrast to the soul-crushing poverty of the rest of the people. Their clothes looked to be made of expensive fabrics with gems inset; they wore jewelry of far greater size than even the most fashion-obsessed would've thought reasonable; and their gaze towards the workers below them was filled with nothing but contempt.

Baljeet's gaze flitted around as he tried to gather as much information as he could without drawing attention to himself. However, his attempt to be inconspicuous failed miserably when he saw something on the balcony above him, and his jaw dropped open in surprise.

Well, two somethings.

* * *

And please review, like these awesome people:

**SleepingKangaroo:** As I have said in SC: I'm not going to say! YOU SHALL NEVER KNOW (until I write more)

**fan-like-irving:** I'd have to agree with your assessment.

**Cute as a button22:** They will... Eventually...

**14AmyChan: **Well, the way it worked in my head was that the two's personalities getting kind of switched would make a nice contrast to the way they're usually portrayed. It didn't work out that well in reality, but oh, well...

**Art n' Music: **I'll do my best, but my update schedule up till now hasn't been the best...

**Bebop12: **Thanks! I do my best!

And lastly, I'm going to be shameless self-promoter and ask everyone to R&R my other fic, The Slender Chronicles!

That's all for today! See you all... Sometime in July, probably.


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